Grace Revealed, Glory Revealed!
Titus 2:11-14

† In His Name †

May you always rejoice in the grace of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ the way a six year old rejoices over the Christmas    presents found in their stockings!

Intro: the glories of young Christmas

Most everyone I know has a Christmas from their childhood that they remember for certain present, or group of presents. Sometimes it is something big like a toboggan, other times it something we didn’t like, except at Christmas, like those old lifesaver books with 10 whole rolls of lifesavers in them.

Maybe its not your childhood, but your children opening the presents, that the memory is so precious that you want every Christmas to be like that! Where the joy is so prevalent that you almost match the angels and shepherds singing for joy!

Sometimes as we grow older, we get more cynical about Christmas, Bob Bennett sang his lighthearted song, “Christmas for cynics, like me” the other night, and I realized sometimes I am the old ground, a match for any Scrooge, and even act like the grinch, desiring to steal other people’s joy as well as my own.

What steals that grace

There was one mem family who used to ruin Christmas for the others, well at least he tried to for his older brother. You see, mom and dad mostly got us the same presents. So if one of us got underwear and a shirt, the other got one, maybe a different colour but the same pattern and style. If one of us got a cassette player, so did the other.. So what the younger brother did was he found ways to determine what his brother got, and then he would know.

But he might leave enough evid4ence  to show the package was tampered with…and since he always got in trouble, they never suspected the younger, more intelligent child, and perhaps geekier looking one to have done ANYTHING wrong.

We all have Satan playing a similar role in our lives, as we are tricked into doing things wrong, as we fall into temptation and evil. That is why Paul wrote Titus, ¹²  And we are instructed to turn from godless living and sinful pleasures.”

Note he didn’t write this to unbelievers, but believers, which means that some believers have problems with godless living and sinful pleasure! If that is you, take courage, there is hope.

We’ve already admitted we need to be healed from sin, we need the help that came and was laid in a manger, born of a young virgin girl,

The glory lit up the skies that night, as His star pointed to His birth, as the grace of God came and dwelt with us, so that we could know that God could and wanted to restore each of us as His child.

That is what this night is about =-revealing the incredible grace of God, the grace the archangel testified to when he said “Glory to God in highest heaven, and peace on earth to those with whom God is pleased.”  Well pleased being another way of saying those who receive grace from God, those whom are restored from the havoc sin causes in their life.

This is what Christmas is all about…

That God came to us, determined to live with us. Who came to restore what sin had stolen, to pay for the punishment that sin deserved.

That wonderful day!

In Lord of the Rings, Gandalf learned that hobbits have a second breakfast, (and a second lunch and so on) We have a second Christmas—the day Paul refers to as that wonderful day, that glorious day when the glory of our great God and savior, Jesus Christ, will be revealed. The day oif the second coming, the second gathering of Jesus, of His people.

That is the day we await for now, the return of the Messiah, when the glory of God is revealed, not just in Jesus, but it is shared with us.

Because He came once, and as Paul writes, “¹⁴  He gave his life to free us from every kind of sin, to cleanse us, and to make us his very own people, totally committed to doing good deeds. Titus 2:14 (NLT2)

And I pray hoping for that day, brings you the excitement of a 6 year old, waiting to see what they got for Christmas… time a million.

AMEN!