Matthew 1:20–23

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

"Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel" (which means, God with us). (Mt 1:20–23)

In 1990, a new Christian men's organization made headlines. It was Promise Keepers, founded by Bill McCartney, then head football coach of the University of Colorado at Boulder. The idea was to introduce men to Jesus Christ, teach them what real manhood was, and urge them to be faithful husbands and fathers.

For a few years, Promise Keepers experienced explosive growth. Now I don't hear much about it. For whatever reason, Promise Keepers isn't in the news much. What happened?

I wonder if maybe the focus was backward. Rather than focusing on men keeping their promises (which isn't at all a bad thing!), maybe the focus should have been on God keeping his promises. One emphasis is Law, while the other is Gospel. You see, no matter how hard we try, no matter how sincere our promises, we're not good at keeping God's Law.

That's why we need the Good News of the Gospel. The Gospel tells us that God Keeps His Promises, Giving Us Confidence to Meet His Son When He Comes Again. What are God's promises that give us confidence?

I.

First, there's the promise God gives in Jesus' name.

If there was ever a godly man who kept his promise, it was Joseph. He was a devout Jew intent on obeying God's laws but whose obedience was tempered by compassion.

Now Joseph was engaged to Mary. An engagement was a legally binding contract. The only way out was divorce. It was expected that engaged people would be chaste. Joseph would keep his part of the bargain. And Mary hers. There'd be no intimacy with each other or anyone else until the marriage was consummated.

But sometime after the engagement, Joseph discovers that Mary is pregnant. He's crushed, angry. Apparently, Mary has been unfaithful. That's how it looked to Joseph. He would be within his legal rights to divorce Mary or even have her stoned to death. But Joseph is not just a law-abiding man; he's a man of compassion. He plans to divorce Mary privately. That way, she can slip away to live with relatives, sparing her any shame.

And Mary does go away to live with relatives. After she becomes pregnant, she goes off to the hill country and lives with her cousin Elizabeth (Lk 1:39–40). Meanwhile, Joseph, hurting from discovering that Mary is pregnant, is working on the divorce. He doesn't get far.

He goes to bed one night, troubled by all this, and guess who visits him? An angel! The angel tells him, "Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" (vv 20–21).

Yes, as we've already noted, Joseph is a godly man. It doesn't even occur to him to question the angel's message. He simply believes it and takes Mary home to be his wife and the mother of our Lord.

Where does he get this confidence and faith? It comes partly from the name the angel tells Joseph to give the Baby, the name "Jesus." In Hebrew, it's "Yeshua," or "Joshua," meaning "Yahweh saves." In those days, the firstborn son was given his father's name. But the father is not Joseph. The name he's to give this Child proclaims who the real father is: God. The Child of Mary is the Son of God who "will save his people from their sins."

In Jesus, God has kept his promise to his people. Because of this Child Jesus, doing what his name promises, saving his people from their sins, Joseph and all who believe in Jesus will face God on the Last Day with no fear at all. It's all in the name. That's the first promise of our text.

Second, there's the promise God gives in Jesus' birth that gives us confidence.

The birth of Jesus was promised in the Old Testament many centuries before it happened. Isaiah writes these famous words: "The Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel" (Is 7:14).

What's so amazing about it? Well, virgins don't have babies, unless God intervenes and makes it so. And in this one unique situation in all of recorded history, he does. The power of the Holy Spirit overshadows the Virgin Mary, and she conceives a child, Jesus, who has come to save us.

Thank God! Because if we take sin seriously, and if we recognize we're miserable sinners, then we know there's no way short of a miracle we can face God on Judgment Day and live. God is absolutely holy, and sin can't exist in his presence. We need to be perfectly holy or we can forget about seeing God and living to tell about it. But we aren't holy and never will be, short of a miracle.

Christmas says the miracle we need has happened. The unapproachable God has taken on flesh in the Virgin's womb and has been born as a human baby. He is Jesus, whom you and I are invited to embrace by faith. When you and I trust Jesus, God declares us holy, as a gift, able to live in his presence, now and forever.

Sometimes we hear about a miracle taking place. A person dying of cancer is suddenly healed. Someone else is miraculously saved when he is tossed out of a crashing automobile while all the passengers inside the car were killed.

But it takes a far greater miracle for you and me to get near God and stand in his presence. Guess what? God has given us that miracle. The Virgin has conceived and given birth to Jesus, the Savior. By faith in this miracle Baby, we stand and live in the presence of God, now and on the day he comes again. That's a confidence we can have because of the promise God gave—and kept—in the birth of Jesus, the virgin birth.

Finally, there's the promise God gives in Jesus' title that gives us confidence.

Besides telling Joseph to give the Baby the name "Jesus," the angel also says, "They shall call his name Emmanuel (which means, God with us)" (v 23). God has miraculously intervened in human affairs.

In the Old Testament, the miraculous event memorialized was the birth of a child as a sign to King Ahaz that God was with his people. Before the child was weaned and could tell the difference between right and wrong, the evil enemies of King Ahaz would be gone. The times were dire. King Ahaz needed a sign of God's presence. The birth of a baby was that sign.

But in Luke's Gospel, the birth of Jesus is more than just evidence that God is with his people. It is that, but much more. As in Old Testament times, Israel's survival is threatened. The people are oppressed by Rome. Revolt after revolt by the Jews are crushed. Has God abandoned his people? No! A Child is born to a Virgin. He is named Jesus because he will save his people from their sins—not from the Romans but from sin.

The cross and the empty tomb would be thirty years later. So how is Jesus' birth a sign that God is with his people till then? That's where his title "Emmanuel" comes in. With the birth of Jesus, God literally is with his people, not just in sign and symbol, but in fact, in the flesh. Because Jesus is God.

In the womb of the Virgin Mary, God took on human flesh and was born as Jesus Christ. Jesus was God and man at conception, when he passed through his mother and was born, when he died on the cross, and when he rose from the dead. He is God and man today. When he comes again, he will still be God and man.

"Emmanuel" tells us all that. Jesus is God with us, and he always will be. He is God with us in history at his birth. He is God with us in mystery as we receive the Lord's Supper. He is God with us in majesty when he comes again. As you and I receive Jesus, our Emmanuel, by faith, we are confident that he will receive us when he comes.

This day, this glorious celebration, is really all about promises kept. God keeping his promise—the promise made to Adam and Eve when they first fell into sin, the promise renewed to God's people through millennia of Old Testament time, the promise voiced so brilliantly by Isaiah and the prophets—the promise that God would send his Son, does give us confidence, certainty, that he will keep his promise to bring us to be with him for eternity. That is the "merry" of Merry Christmas!

We close by praying the Collect for Christmas Eve: "O God, You make us glad with the yearly remembrance of the birth of Your only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ. Grant that as we joyfully receive Him as our Redeemer, we may with sure confidence behold Him when He comes to be our Judge; through the same Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen."