God is above but He is not pushed up; He is beneath but He is not pressed down. He is outside but He is not excluded. He is inside but He is not confined. God is above all things presiding beneath all things, sustaining outside all things embracing and inside all things filling. He said that is the imminence of God. God with us. God Most Nigh.
Preached at National Community Church. Used by permission.
NATIONAL COMMUNITY CHURCH
December 2, 2012
Thrill of Hope: O Come O Come Emmanuel
Mark Batterson
Welcome to everybody at all six of our locations. We are thrilled that you are part of NCC this
weekend. Before we dive in, can I encourage you to extend an invitation to a friend? I think this
is a season where people are more likely than ever, more open than ever to come to church. So if
you have a friend who doesn’t have a church, I encourage them to invite them to come with you
and be part of what God is doing here at National Community Church.
Just for the record, next weekend, our Pastor of Discipleship, Heather Zempel, will be speaking.
Then December 15/16, I’ll be back and have a little gift for you, a little Christmas weekend.
Then all of our campus pastors will be teaching live the weekend before Christmas.
Turn over to Matthew Chapter 1 and we’ll get there in just a moment. I love Christmas for lots of
different reasons. It starts when I go up in our attic because that’s where all of our stuff is. I pull
out the ladder and pull out the Christmas tree. We put up the tree. I love the glow of the
Christmas tree early in the morning and late at night. I love peppermint mochas, eggnog, lattes
and I love listening to Christmas music. I love all of the trappings and traditions but let’s not
forget the reason for the season! We are celebrating the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ and what
that means. I love the title of this series. It is pulled from one of the songs that we’ll sing
together, Thrill of Hope. I think that word ‘hope’ captures it. The truth is, you could probably say
joy or love or peace captures it too, but this idea of hope is so central to what Christmas is all
about. I think what we are going to do is what Acts 2:26 says we should do, we are going to
pitch our tents in the land of hope. I love that little verse. That is the Message translation. How
many of you know you can pitch your tent in lots of different places? You can pitch it in the land
of fear. You can pitch it in the land of guilt, in the land of anxiety, you can pitch it in the land of
negativity if you can find a place, it’s pretty full! You can pitch your tent in the land of bitterness
or you can pitch your tent in the land of hope. I think over the next four weeks, we are going to
pitch our tent in the land of hope and believe that God is going to meet us in a special way.
I always pray that during the Christmas season, God would give me a fresh revelation of who He
is and I believe He is going to do that for each one of us.
Matthew 1:18
18 This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be
married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the
Holy Spirit. 19 Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her
to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.
20 But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said,
“Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is
conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him
the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 23 “The virgin will
conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with
us”).
God with us.
This week, I was waiting in line to make a deposit at our bank and the lady in front of me was
taking forever. In fact, she turned around at one point and apologized to me. When she left, one
of the tellers said, ‘Hey, do you know who that was?’ I said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘That was the
former Secretary of Labor.’ I looked it up and sure enough, that was her. I don’t know, it was
like wow, I just bumped into an important person. There is something about that, whether it is an
athlete or a politician or someone that has a TV personality. There is something about bumping
into someone like that that is cool, right? I am not an autograph seeker or a photo bomber. I’m
not that kind of person unless it is Adrian Peterson! My first brush with someone famous, I was
17 years at a golf course in Chicago. I was in the bathroom and in walked Doug Collins, who
was the coach at that time, and he parked at the urinal right next to me. We did not shake hands
but it was cool. I’m a huge Bulls fan and I was like O my goodness! I just peed next to Doug
Collins! Can I say that? It was a highlight of my life at that point!
Over the years, I’ve bumped into different people here and there. I remember when I was in
seminary in the Chicago area, I bumped into Steve Kerr, who was the shooting guard on the
Bulls during some of their championship runs and the funny thing was, he was wearing a Bulls
sweatshirt. What was so funny about that was the fact that Jordan and Pippen and everybody
would be incognito. But Steve Kerr was the less-than-tall white guy on the team so here he was
wearing the sweatshirt and we were pushing our grocery cart and I was like that’s Steve Kerr!
When we held services at Union Station, I bumped into people all the time. I remember one
Sunday, Anthony Hopkins was shooting a film while we were having service downstairs in the
movie theater. One time, Chris Collinsworth was walking through and we took a picture
together. John Riggins, the former Redskin, I’m starting to sound like a stalker! I promise you
I’m not but Pastor Joel might be! We were in Ethiopia and into our hotel walks actress Natalie
Portman. It was weird bumping into someone like that half way around the world. What I loved
is that Pastor Joel went up to her and said Hi. In fact, I’ll tell you exactly what he said, ‘My
nephew loved you as Queen Amidala.’ It was a lame moment! I can tell you about a number of
folks I’ve bumped into but there is something about being in the presence of someone that has a
little bit of fame or a little bit of power or a little bit of recognizability. They almost seem like
they are more than human or super human. But here’s the deal, take all those instances where
you bump into someone or you are in the presence of ‘human greatness’ so to speak, and then
you juxtapose that with being in the presence of Almighty God! Shouldn’t we get a little bit
excited? When we get into the presence of God, shouldn’t there be like a Wow! I just bumped
into the presence of God! That’s what Christmas celebrates. The fact that the God of the
universe, the Creator, the Sovereign One became one of us. He moved into the neighborhood.
The incarnation. I think what I love about Jesus so much is that when you read the gospels, He is
the epitome of holiness but wasn’t holier than thou. In fact, He was so down to earth that you
couldn’t keep people away, not prostitutes, not lepers, not little children; Pharisees, yes, but
everybody else! He was so touchable, so reachable, and it is at Christmas, at Bethlehem that God
Most High became God Most Nigh.
I want to talk about this for a few moments. Isaiah 55:8 is kind of my theological ground zero. It
says:
As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts
higher than your thoughts, declares the Lord.
The prophet describes the difference between our thoughts and his thoughts as the distance of the
universe. Let me try to put this into perspective. I haven’t done this in a long time so let me give
it a shot.
Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. That is so fast, everybody snap your fingers. In the
time it took to do that, light circumnavigated the globe half a dozen times. Our sun is 93 million
miles away. So let’s just say we could drive there, at 65 miles an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days
of years, anybody want to guess how long it would take you to get there? It would take 163
years! That’s a long way! The incredible thing is that our sunlight is only 8 minutes old because
it is traveling so fast. Here’s the thing, that’s our closest star in our tiny little galaxy called the
Milky Way. Astrophysics discovered galaxies that are 15.5 billion light years away. That
distance is virtually incomprehendable. I’m not even going to try to put that in mathematical
terms because it is impossible but it is this distance that is unimaginable and God says that is
about the distance between your thoughts and my thoughts. So here’s my thought, your best
thought on your best day is 15.5 billion light years short of how great and how good God really
is.
The prophet Jeremiah said no one can fathom his greatness.
Ephesians 3 says He is able to immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine according to
his power that is at work within us.
He is God Most High but He is also God Most Nigh.
Let me go all the way back to the book of Genesis and we’ll find out way back to Bethlehem in a
bit. In Genesis 1, it says that the Spirit of God was hovering over the chaos. The Hebrew word is
one on my favorites that is a two-dimensional word. In regard to time, it refers to the split second
right before and the split second right after something happens. It is almost like this idea that it
forms a parentheses in time around every single moment. It is a fascinating concept. Thomas
Merton captures it this way: The Lord travels in all directions at once and the Lord arrives in all
directions at once. Wherever we are, we find that He just departed and wherever we go, we find
that He just arrived before us.
It is this idea that He is the Alpha and the Omega. God exists outside of our space time
dimensions and that it this idea of hovering. God hovers. But there is a second dimension, not
just time but in regards to space, this word refers to the place right in front and right in back. I
love that! It is like a parentheses in space. What I’m trying to say is that God has you
surrounded! He is all around us all the time.
And David paints a picture of this in Psalm 129. He says in verse 5: You hem me in behind and
before. This idea of hemming in is such a beautiful concept. It says You have laid your hand
upon me, such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. Then it says where
can I go from your Spirit. Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you
are there. If I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I
settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold
me.
A.W. Tozer said:
God is above but He is not pushed up; He is beneath but He is not pressed down.
He is outside but He is not excluded. He is inside but He is not confined. God is
above all things presiding beneath all things, sustaining outside all things
embracing and inside all things filling. He said that is the imminence of God.
God with us. God Most Nigh.
John 1:14 says that the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. In other
words, God put skin on. Hebrews 4:15 says We do not have a high priest who is unable to
sympathize with our weaknesses but we have one who was tempted in every way just as we are
yet was without sin. That is amazing! So relatable, so touchable, so accessible and we take it for
granted. But for thousands of years, it did not work this way. For thousands of years, there was
only one person, the high priest, who could gain access to the inner presence of God, the holy of
holies and he could only do it once a year. But we have immediate access anytime anyplace.
The High Priest invites us into his throne room. Approach the throne of grace with confidence
so that we might receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
Here’s what I want you to hear this weekend, we are singing this song O Come O Come
Emmanuel, but really it is about this, O Come O Come Mark. God is singing that to me and He
is singing that to you. He says Behold I stand at the door and knock, if anyone says come in, I
will sup with him and he with Me. It is this idea that at Bethlehem, God became one of us and
then invited us to the table, invited us into relationship. He is God with us. He is God for us.
I like this idea of God with us and God for us.
One of my favorite Christmas stories, a little boy named Benjamin who wanted a baby sister for
Christmas and he decided to write God a letter. He sat down and wrote: Dear God, I’ve been a
very good boy. Then he stopped writing because he knew it wasn’t true and God wouldn’t
believe it. So he started over: Dear God, I’ve been a pretty good boy. Then he stopped again
because he didn’t feel like it was very convincing. He threw it away. Then he came up with a
little plan. He went into the bathroom and grabbed a towel and walked over to the family nativity
scene and grabbed the figurine of Mary and wrapped her in a towel and hid her under his bed
then he sat down and rewrote his letter: Dear Jesus, if you ever want to see your mother again!
Some of you didn’t feel like you should laugh at that! But it’s funny, we do what Benjamin did.
We employ the same tactics in our attempts to get what we want from God. We use bribery and
blackmail, don’t we? We say, Dear God, if you do this, I’ll do that. That’s bribery! And then
blackmail, God if you don’t do this, I won’t do that. Listen, that is never going to work and you
don’t even need to do it because God is for you. And if we would ever understand the heart of
our heavenly Father, we would understand that no good will God withhold from those who walk
uprightly before Him.
Matthew 7:11 says it this way, If you then though you are evil know how to give good gifts to
your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask Him.
God with us. God for us. And finally, He is God in us.
In John, 16:7, Jesus says something that is kind of confusing. He says, I tell you the truth, it is for
your good that I’m going away, unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you, but if I go,
I will send Him to you.
Well, I thought Jesus said ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’ I thought Jesus said, ‘I am
with you always even unto the end of the age.’ So why would He say it’s good for me to go
away? It is simple, because God became man. When He moved into the neighborhood and took
on flesh, He could only be in one place at one time. He took upon Himself human limitations. So
why does He say He has to go away? It is part of God’s master plan. This is the changing of the
guard and it happens at Pentecost. When Jesus ascends and those early believers gather in the
upper room in Jerusalem and then they get a serious visitation from the Holy Spirit, in that
moment, the Spirit of God moves in and takes up residence within us as the followers of Christ.
This is a crazy thing to understand. I remember trying to explain it to the kids when they were
smaller. One night I was singing a chorus to Parker, Spirit move in your temple. It’s almost an
invitation to the Holy Spirit to come and fill us and I asked Parker if he knew what the temple
was and he said, ‘The church?’ And I said, ‘No, actually the Bible says that we are the temple of
the Holy Spirit, I Corinthians 6.’ When we put our faith in Jesus, his Holy Spirit moves in and
lives inside of us. I’ll never forget what Parker said. He said, ‘Cool! So my skin is like fake
marble.’ That’s a deep thought. I think he was six or seven years old. I think that’s awesome.
We are walking temples. God with us and God for us and God in us. In Him we live and move
and have our being.
I think we take a lot for granted. With some of the personal challenges I’ve been through,
medically, physically over the years, and probably in light of the fact that I have asthma, I am
more keenly appreciative of every breath I take. But just stop and think about this for a moment.
When was the last time you considered the journey of an oxygen atom? It begins when air
passes through your nose or mouth and unwanted dust is filtered out. The average person moves
about 440 cubic feet of air per day, some of you hot air! Just making sure you are with me. It
travels through the trachea into the lungs. Did you know the surface area of your lungs is 40
times greater than the surface area of your body? Oxygen atoms travel through the entire body
via blood vessels. If those blood vessels were laid end to end, they would be approximately
100,000 miles long. That’s long enough to circle the equator four times, in your body, blood
vessels. At the end of that journey, oxygen enters individual cells and bonds with the food we eat
and releases energy. Biologists call it cellular respiration. I call it a miracle! And it happens
approximately 23,000 times a day! I think we owe God 23,000 thank yous. We experience
23,000 miracles.
Acts 17 says God gives all men life and breath. Job 34 says If God were to withdraw his breath,
we would return to dust.
God with us, God for us, God in us.
Let me close with this. As we step into this Christmas season, I think it is a time for us to, in a
sense, count our blessings, in the business of shopping or parties or travel and everything else
that happens, we need to make sure that we remember what this thing is all about and that our
hearts are filled with gratitude for Emmanuel, God with us.
This week, I drove down to Regent University to defend a dissertation. I had been ABD for more
than a decade. I never thought I would finish it. Honestly, the family started growing, the church
started growing and it just wasn’t a priority and then I started writing books and they pay me to
write books! So the dissertation just became this thing that I never thought I would do. But one
thing led to another and on Wednesday of this week, I passed! I’m done! When I drove onto the
campus, there were some interesting memories. I would go down there for a week at a time ten
years ago, but it is one of those places that trigger a memory for me. In 1998, I was sitting in one
of those doctoral classes and I got called out by an administrator who came and found me and
said that my wife needed to talk to me. I was concerned because that was very strange. She
informed me that she had just gotten a call that her dad had passed away. It was absolute shock.
We drove from Virginia Beach back to D.C. and got on an airplane and the next thing we knew,
we were meeting the family at a funeral home. It was just a blur. I still don’t get it, prime of life,
prime of ministry and had just been to the doctor and the doctor said you could drive a mac truck
through his arteries and then he died of a heart attack. So when I drove onto the campus, a
profound sense of sadness came over me. You know, you shut it out and you go on with life but,
man, I miss him. I miss his presence. A lot of us have lost love ones and there’s probably a wide
variety of why you might miss them. My father-in-law was fun to be around. It was a party when
he was around. He was so loving and giving. I remember at Christmas, the deal was, almost
always there would be tickets to the Chicago Bulls under our Christmas plates. So it wasn’t
really a surprise but we acted surprised. It was a fun tradition. What I miss most is just his
presence. I think now about my family and the ones I love the most. I love being with my
family. I love driving the kids all over the place. Summer is swimming and she had practices at
6:00 a.m. on the absolute other side of the city, so we have some early mornings together, and we
don’t talk a lot because she sleeps! But even in those moments, it is hard to explain but I enjoy
her presence because I love her! It is the same way for all my children. I think one of the greatest
gifts we can give another person is our presence. What I mean by that is not just being there
absent-mindedly or just barely listening or not really engaged. I’m talking about being fully
present and fully engaged and fully interested and fully available. The gift of your presence to
another person is something that is precious. If I had to describe my dad in a phrase, he was there
for me. It was his presence that I appreciate. That’s the gift we celebrate. It doesn’t really matter
what’s under the tree, right? What we really celebrate is the fact that our heavenly Father gave us
the greatest gift imaginable, his own Son.
For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him
should not perish but have everlasting life.
In other words, that is God’s way of saying, ‘I don’t want to just be with you, I want to be with
you forever!’ I can’t imagine eternity without you.
Let’s pray.
Father help us this weekend to personalize and to internalize Emmanuel, God with us. Lord as
we sing the words O Come O come Emmanuel, I pray that we would hear You singing over us,
singing words to us, O Come O Come Mark. You invite us to come into your presence and we
thank You for that precious gift. Lord I pray that no one would walk out this weekend without
receiving the gift that You have freely offered. It can’t just be about what happened 2,000 years
ago. We have to personally and decisively come to a point in our life where we decide to follow
You and we decide to receive You and where we decide to put our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Lord I pray that many right now in this moment would experience God with them for the very
first time. We invite You to come and fill our hearts with your love and fill our temples with
your Spirit. O Come O Come Emmanuel. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
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