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In our youth service this past Wednesday, we concluded our Christmas series on the topic, “Alone”.

I’m struck by the name Immanuel for Jesus. It means: “God with us.”

I believe each of us has a deep desire to be loved and accepted. We want to belong and matter to someone. Often, we try to fulfill that desire through the wrong means and in the wrong places.

“With” – but God chose to be with us. He didn’t just love us from a distance; He came close. He did this, so we won’t be alone. He did this because He’s the only one that can truly satisfy our desire to belong and be loved.

Unfortunately, this is where many followers of Jesus stop.

We like to be loved and accepted by God. We join a church where other people like us create experiences that help us feel better about God’s love. We separate from unholiness and ungodliness (which is good) but we tend to forget who we were when we experienced God’s love (not so good).

I told our students on Wednesday night that we need more students in our youth group that swear. We need more students who have problems in their life, who steal, who are involved in unhealthy relationships and who do all sorts of horrible, sinful things.

Why? Because we are to accept and love others just as Jesus loved and accepted us. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Not at our best. Not when we had everything under control. Not when we were holy. Not when we stopped doing drugs or quit swearing. But when we were at our worst.

I had three concluding thoughts for our students:

1. We all have a deep desire to belong and to be loved.
2. God wants to be with us. He leans over and reaches out (reference to Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam which I showed in the message-cropped, of course) to be with us in spite of the fact that we don’t deserve it.
3. When we’ve experienced God’s love, we are motivated to share that with others.

I told our students that we’re great at recognizing and experiencing #1 and #2, but we’ve got a lot of work to do on #3. (Actually, if we do the first two and stop at the third, I’d have to question whether or not the previous points ever occurred.) Sure, we’ve made some progress with our Campus Missionary Training and with inviting friends to some of our events, but for the most part, we’ve missed out on an important part of who we are called to be as followers of Jesus.

I’m just not content with a nice “country club” youth group. I don’t want to create a nice, safe environment for students. I want to challenge them to live dangerously for Christ and to sacrifice everything in their pursuit of Him. I don’t want a place for Christians. I want a place where the broken are mended, the insignificant find meaning and where those who are alone experience love and belonging.

This Christmas I want “with” to signify more than “God with us.” I want us to live it out in such a way that it means “God with others, through us“.

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I posted the other day about our current sermon series. The first message dealt with the theme of Broken.

Last Wednesday, we dealt with Insignificant. I showed the following clip (original can be found at www.crazylovebook.com).

When you think about the hugeness of God and his creation, you begin to realize how small and insignificant we are. Since we’re nearing Christmas, let’s think about the creative process up at the North Pole. Santa has a bunch of magical elves who work in sweatshop-like conditions, toiling over a workbench using raw materials to create wonderful toys for selfish children.

God doesn’t have elves or a workshop. He doesn’t even make use of raw materials.

Instead, he speaks. The very act of speaking brings about huge ginormous creation.

So when this great, huge, amazing God wants to declare the arrival of His Son on a small insignificant planet, who does He tell? What news organizations were given a press release? Which heads of state were invited to the announcement ceremonies? Where did He spend His marketing dollars? Who does He tell?

Some shepherds in a field.

Shepherds. Despised by Roman society and considered lower than other peasants. They were boys and girls, probably around the age of 12. They had little income and their work was unskilled.

Not quite the people I’d be announcing my divine plans to.

But that’s the way God works. He finds significance in the insignificant. He desires to know those who the world would rather ignore. He wants to use inconsequential people (like us) to make a substantial difference in the world.

When I think about Christmas, I can’t help but think about a huge God who humbled Himself and came to earth…for insignificant me.
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We’ve been doing a series of messages during our youth service entitled, “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”. Our first message (12/3) dealt with the topic, “Broken”.

In this message we talked about how Christmas is a time for family. Usually that’s good, but we all have those “crazy” relatives who seem to come out of the woodwork during the holidays. The students shared some funny stories about “that” person who just seems out of touch with the rest of the family.

Then I talked about how the Christmas story really starts in Matthew with a genealogy. This is one of those sections of the Bible that we usually skip because we can’t even pronouce half the names. But I explained to the students that we were going to take a look at the list to see if Jesus’ relatives were all upstanding believers.

We quickly discovered that wasn’t the case. Jesus’ family tree was a bit dysfunctional: pagans, murders, adulterers and others made the list. Four, however, stand out. Matthew lists four women, which is a bit odd for a patriarchal society.

They are:

• Tamar: fooled her father-in-law into having sex with her
• Rahab: prostitute
• Ruth: pre-marital sex (That whole, “uncover” his feet thing? A euphemism. We can agree to disagree, but I don’t think she was as pure as most think. You can read more here.)
• Bathsheba: committed adultery

It’s almost as though Matthew is highlighting the fact that Jesus had some messed up relatives. But here’s the point: if Jesus’ family didn’t define him or disqualify him, then our family situation doesn’t either. More than our family, our own brokeness and shortcomings don’t disqualify us. Though each of us are broken and we need God to restore us, none of us are damaged beyond repair.

That’s what the Christmas story is about: our brokenness. It’s about Jesus coming to earth as a baby to provide a way for us to receive healing and restoration. And once that process begins in us, He wants us to then go and be agents of life and restoration to the world around us. Christmas is our reminder that God cared enough to reach out to us, now we must go and do the same for others who are in need.

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