What’s the second gift they gave? Frankincense. Frankincense was incense used by Jewish priests as a part of temple worship. What does a priest do? A priest connects people with God, the God from whom we so easily separate. Who is this child? This child is in a miraculous way the union of divine and human, born to connect your heart with the heart of your God. This child is born to bring you home to your heavenly Father. This child is born to return your heart, which spends so much time fractured, to its wholeness in God.
Do not discount this second gift. You need Jesus to be your king, but you also need Him to be your priest. There are people listening to me right now who have been wounded so long you have forgotten what it’s like to be whole. There are people listening to me right now who have been carrying sin so long you have forgotten what it’s like to be clean, and you don’t have to live that way.
Gold, frankincense and then myrrh. The third is one of the strangest gifts in the world to give a baby. Myrrh, the third gift the Wise Men brought, was used in the embalming of the dead, and reminds us this child was born to be king, to be priest, and to be sacrifice. This child was born to die, that in His death He might win a victory we could never achieve on our own; so that as we live in Him we might be freed from the ultimate power of death and have a future that outsoars the grave.
To me one of the most unusual ornaments in the city of Houston is also one of the best. We put it at the top of our sanctuary Christmas tree each year. It’s right up there on the top. It’s the crown of thorns, and it can seem completely out of place on the tree. Yet then you think about what this child was all about, and you realize it’s the most appropriate ornament you could put on the tree. For this child was born to pay a price we could not pay, so that as we live in Him our death will become simply a door into the larger life of His Kingdom.
Do you begin to see how this works? The Wise Men brought gold, frankincense and myrrh, which show us what this child was born to do, the gifts the child was born to give. As you begin to think about it, you begin to understand how as we live in him the gifts bring freedom from fear. Freedom from fear of the world. Freedom from fear of our own broken hearts. Freedom from the fear of death. Suddenly, you can begin to understand how the angels can command you to joy instead of fear, because the child whose birth they proclaim bears in a tiny and vulnerable package the power to shatter all those things we have learned to fear.
For the next several weeks we’re going to be looking at this idea and how we can claim the gifts of Christ in the face of all of this world may sometimes do to us, all that we may be carrying in our own hearts right now, and all that would face us in our own death and the loss of loved ones. We’re going to look in very practical and specific ways at all of these crucial concepts. For this morning, though, I simply want us to understand where the journey to assurance starts. It starts with Christ.
There is so much we all would like to have. There is so much that would improve our lives, and it’s so easy to think that if we just had this or just had that, then everything would be fine. You know, though, that that feeling is a lie, because you know that if all of your wishes were in place, in two weeks you’d need something more. That’s how the world works. You get this right. You get that right. And then there’s always something after that. So what happens is that, if you’re trapped in that mindset, you’re on a merry-go-round of worry.
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