THE JESUS CHRIST-MAS SERIES

“THE CHRISTMAS LIGHT”

  Isaiah 49:1-6

  November 26, 2006

      Pastor Mike Barnett

 INTRO/ILLUS:

  • Now that Thanksgiving is over, we have officially entered Christmas season once again.
  • We will start seeing Christmas displays full of beautiful lights in the weeks proceeding Christmas.
  • Not long ago the Arkansas Supreme court ordered a Little Rock resident to "reduce substantially" the size of the Christmas display in his front yard.
  • That’s right – the Supreme Court of the State of Arkansas told a man he has to take down some of his Christmas lights!
  • "Government intrusion into my personal freedom" you may protest. "How extreme and invasive!" Maybe so. But this was no ordinary front yard Christmas display.
  • For many years Little Rock resident, Jennings Osborn has literally covered his mammoth suburban home with red Christmas lights and glowing Christmas figurines. These figurines weren’t a few little snowmen.
  • But an eighteen foot high Santa along with similarly sized reindeer and elves. And we’re not talking about a few strands of Christmas lights. Osborne used over three million red lights, a setup that required special power lines coming to his home. Three million lights – that’s 30,000 boxes of 100. Quite a few trips to the department store.
  • Could you image that guy’s wife when she sent him to the store to get some new Christmas lights and he came back with 30,000 boxes of lights, 3 million in all?
  • Not to mention an 18 foot Santa and reindeer set. I wander if he came home with some ice cream and flowers for his wife while he was at it while he was at it?
  • Osborne’s display was so famous that tens of thousands of people drove along his quiet suburban street each Christmas.
  • This finally pushed his neighbors over the edge, so they sued. Their lawsuit ended up in the State Supreme Court. The court concluded that Mr. Osborne had to down scale a little.
  • Although I can understand the neighbor’s point of view, I share with Jennings Osborn a fondness for Christmas lights.
  • Not for putting them up, (although I do in order to meet Michelle’s love language).

·                    What I really like to do is, to drive the minivan through all the neighborhoods of prior Lake, Savage, Burnsville, Lakeville and Apple Valley with Michelle, Maxwell and Mitchell and look at all the lights and displays. Then after an hour of doing this, Maxwell gets bored and says, "O.K. time to go home now and watch the Grinch now". We have to bribe him with candy canes to keep him happy for an addition 15 minutes of viewing pleasure. But even that is not enough time to see all the lights there are to be seen in the south of the river suburbs. So to see all the lights we want to see, we have to go out 4 or 5 times every Christmas season to get all our viewing pleasure in. Then we go home and watch "The Grinch that almost Stole Christmas" on video and drink eggnog. Only then is Maxwell perfectly content in his own home watching his show and drinking his eggnog.

·        The festive use of lights at Christmas goes back many centuries.

·        Christians often make a connection between lights and the star of Bethlehem.

·         Even more profoundly, our lights can symbolize the light of God coming into the world at Christmas.

·        In this sermon I would like to examine the biblical background behind the understanding of Jesus as the light of the world.

·        We will look at the Old Testament for an enriched understanding of Christmas.

·        In this