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We easily draw safe boundaries around God’s grace, welcoming those who seem familiar while overlooking those who feel foreign or difficult. Yet the distant wise men of Matthew 2 and the rejoicing Gentiles of Acts 13 confront those boundaries: Jesus came to reach the world. Who might God be placing beyond our comfort, yet within the reach of his good news?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
Matthew places the magi story only in his gospel, specifically after establishing Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. Why do you think he felt it was important to immediately follow that genealogy and claim with foreigners coming to worship? What was he trying to communicate to his Jewish audience, and what similarities do you see between their arrival and the Gentiles’ response to the gospel in Acts 13?
The sermon contrasts “completely foreign” people (like those from Afghanistan or Persia) with “familiar but different” people (like the Samaritans or neighbors who annoy us). Which category feels harder for you to reach out to with the gospel, and why? What makes one more uncomfortable than the other?
Peter struggled with the vision in Acts 10, initially resisting God’s call to minister to Gentiles. Where do you find yourself resisting God’s expansion beyond your comfort zone—whether in your church, workplace, or neighborhood? What would it look like to embrace that expansion?
The sermon suggests we sometimes “lose sight” of what God is doing, like the smart speaker that forgot about its “away mode.” In what ways might your church or faith community be unaware of how God is already working beyond your current boundaries or focus?
Who are the “Magi” or “Gentiles” God may have placed in your life—people who seem unfamiliar, difficult, or outside your usual circles? What practical step could you take this year to pray for, welcome, or share the good news with someone just beyond your comfortable reach?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
So we’ve been thinking about the ultimate Christmas tree, and now we need to think about the action and reaction that comes out of it. So welcome to a new series, Reaction. We’re going to be building on the journey of what we explored over Advent and Christmas, and thinking about what we see in the arrival of the wise men or the magi, and how it plays into what we do in this new year.
As we think about that, I want to consider what we get wrong about the wise men. We get lots of things wrong about them. If you’ve been around church long enough, you’ve heard how we don’t put them in the right place in a nativity scene. Yes, I know I was just talking about how we shouldn’t have nativity scenes the other week, but we’re used to seeing them, right? And we’re used to seeing a camel and some wise men in them. Why? Well, because they’re part of the story, but they’re down the road, right? The best example I heard was a few years ago, someone said you should have them a few rooms away from your nativity scene because they’re not there yet.
So we get that wrong, but another thing that I think we get wrong is how foreign they are, how alien, so to speak, they are in the story. Because yes, we see them in their grand clothes and riding camels, but we think of the Middle East, we think of Israel, and it doesn’t really strike us as all that different. And if we think about, say, Renaissance paintings of biblical scenes, well, what do you know, they all seem to wear about the same thing. We start to sort of think of them almost as just a natural part of the story. And they are, but not in the way that we think of.
It would seem weird for these wise men, these magi, to come from a land far away and come to meet the new king of the Jews. This was strange. So yes, they’re part of the story. But if you’ve never heard the story before, they should be a shocking part of the story.
Tonight, I was talking about how we sometimes get the wise men wrong. We might say, I’m going to get the passage wrong. We’re not going to spend a lot of time in Matthew chapter 2. We’re actually going to turn to Acts 13 on this Epiphany Sunday. Why would we do that? Because what we see is that what ultimately is hard to get our minds around and was hard 2,000 years ago for folks to get their minds around about how different the wise men were and how strange it was they showed up, well, that’s an ongoing problem.
And so as we think about the wise men’s reaction to Jesus, the action of God coming into the world, I want us to think about how the early church faced this as well, and how we continue to do so today, because we want to make sure that as we go into the new year, we react to Christmas, as we do every year, that we’re reacting as God has called us to.
So will you join me in prayer as we begin tonight? Father, thank you for this evening. Lord, we thank you for the beauty and wonder of what you do for us. Would you help us to better understand the grace that you show us? Lord, would you help us to understand that grace in a way that drives us to show that grace and to show it in places we may not even think about, but you do. We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
So we are going to take a look just to get started tonight. We have to look at Matthew 2:1. Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem. But now let’s jump over to Acts 13, because they might seem unrelated at first, but they’re actually dealing with the same thing. Listen to what happens in Acts 13, verse 44. You can turn there if you’d like in your Bible.
The next Sabbath, almost the whole city gathered to hear the word of the Lord. But when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and began to contradict what was spoken by Paul, reviling him. And Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly, saying, It was necessary that the word of God be spoken first to you, since you thrust aside and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life. Behold, we are turning to the Gentiles. For so the Lord has commanded us, saying, I have made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.
Jesus came, we see in both of these instances, to reach the world. Not just Bethlehem. Not just Judea. Not just Judea and what had been ancient Israel or is modern Israel. Not just what we think of as Christendom today. Jesus came to reach the world.
I think it’s telling that Matthew is the one who tells us the story of the wise men. They’re only there in Matthew’s gospel. Not in Luke. Not in Mark. Not in John. Not somewhere else in the Bible, referring back. They’re only there in Matthew’s gospel. Why? Because Matthew’s writing to a Jewish audience, to an audience that’s been waiting for the Messiah. And he wants them to know about the Messiah. He’s going to talk an awful lot about how the Messiah fulfills the prophecies of the Old Testament. That they’ve been waiting for this King and he’s here and they should believe. He’s going to talk about that. That’s his goal.
But he also wants them to understand that’s not the end fulfillment. That’s not all of it. And so, not Luke who’s writing to Jews and Gentiles, but a lot to Gentiles. Not Mark who, again, he has presumably a Roman audience, or John. But Matthew decides to do what? After he’s done the genealogy and made his case that Jesus is the legitimate Messiah, he goes into, and now let me tell you about these non-Jews that came to worship him. What? Why does he do that? Because he wants them to understand that Jesus is the Messiah, the King, not just for the Jews. Yes, for the Jews.
Jesus was born of a Jewish mother. He was born and did ministry initially in the land of Israel. He read the Bible that the other Jews were reading because, guess what, he’s the God who gave it to them, and he’s the God who had chosen them. But the danger there would be to think, here’s our safe group, here’s whom we worry about, and forget about the others.
And so right at the beginning, when we’re looking for, in Matthew’s gospel, who, outside of Mary and Joseph, has any sense of what’s going on, any willingness to believe, we don’t start with Jews or God-fearing Gentiles who are already converts, we start with these Magi from the East. They probably were coming from someplace like Persia. Tradition puts them in the Parthian Empire, so it would have been somewhere between the border of India and modern Iraq, somewhere in that range. So Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, that area, an area that often still feels remote and distant to us today.
We hear about it a lot, but I don’t know anyone who, say, outside of being sent on military duty in years past, is planning to, say, go on a trip to Afghanistan. Even today it feels remote, but it felt remote then as well. It wasn’t the near surrounding areas. Yes, all the time, if you lived in Judea of the first century, you were encountering Romans, you were encountering Greeks, you were encountering Egyptians and other North African folks, right? You’re in a trading route and you have all that, but now we’re talking about far flung.
God could have sent some wise men from Egypt, it wouldn’t have seemed nearly as notable. But no, we see these people respond early on who aren’t part of the obvious people, and not only are they not part of the obvious people, they’re really not part of the obvious people.
Now we can explain how that happened, right? Jews went to exile in Babylon. There’s Jewish communities further east because of that. Even if the wise men went even further to the east, there’s at least some connection. We can see why they had the scriptures and could study them, but it’s still foreign, so to speak. Really foreign.
We know that feeling today, right? There’s certain cultures that we’re around a lot and we’re used to, and they don’t really feel foreign. Wherever you live in the world, the people around you, and probably a lot of the countries that share a like culture, don’t feel all that foreign. Sometimes we talk about the Western world, and if you’re an American and you’re sitting here in the United States and you think of, say, England, does it have some novelty to it? Yes, but it doesn’t really feel all that foreign.
You can speak the same language. You might think, well, France feels maybe a little exotic, but not that foreign. But Afghanistan? Yeah, that feels foreign, right? Totally different culture and very hard for most of us to get our heads around. And actually, because of the restrictive communication in that part of the world, probably all of us here tonight, wherever you are in the world, if you’re in Kenya tonight or you’re in India tonight or you’re in Mexico tonight, the area the wise men are coming from still might be kind of foreign because it’s not an area that any of us can necessarily easily go to. Can’t just go to Iran or Afghanistan.
So that sense that we have, we should take that back to Matthew and say, why is Matthew saying this? Because he wants them, the people reading this, to realize that same sense. Wow, this is something big, something happening. So our sense of the wise men is these familiar figures kind of takes away some of the bite of what’s happening. We don’t want to let that happen.
It’s Jesus’ ministry through and through, and that’s why we’re looking at Acts 13 as well. And there’s a bridge between the two. It’s not just the beginning of the gospel story, Christmas story, and then later on as the church expands. It’s all between. For example, Matthew chapter 4, where does Jesus go to do ministry? He goes to Galilee of the Gentiles. A lot of the people didn’t want to hear from Jesus because he was ministering in Galilee. He was ministering around the Samaritans. He was ministering around the more foreign influenced parts of the general vicinity of what had been Israel.
So if you look, for example, at Matthew 4:15-16, Matthew himself says, by the way, there’s a reason for that. We heard part of that earlier in the service as Jim gave our call to worship. And we thought about what it is that God’s doing. And what we see here in this promise that Matthew then refers to is that where does Jesus go to? Well, take a look at Isaiah 9:1.
But there will be no gloom for her who is in anguish. In the former time, he was brought into contempt, the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali. But in the latter time, he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations or of the Gentiles.
The promise goes, in Matthew we see, to the rejected regions we read about in Isaiah. So Matthew’s doing two things early on here. He’s saying those people that feel completely foreign to you, they speak a different language, they wear different clothes, they eat different things, they have a whole different view on things, those people, they’re relevant to the story of what the king is coming to do.
But also those people that you know pretty well, say the people in Galilee, the people that are a lot like you, but different enough from you to deeply annoy you, and maybe you dislike them even more because you understand them, and that makes you even more upset with them, he’s there for them too. We get that right at the front of the Gospel of Matthew.
So Matthew makes the connection explicit. He says, look where Jesus is doing ministry, and look what Isaiah says, and it’s really interesting when you think about where Isaiah said that ministry was going to happen, because those particular tribes of Israel that fell to the Assyrian Empire 700 or so years earlier, they were the first to fall. Samaria, the northern kingdom, the part of Israel that broke off from David’s kingdom under his grandson.
We’ve been thinking about the kings over the 12 days of Christmas—that break that we talked about—well, all of them were unfaithful, but when we’re talking about Naphtali and Zebulun, we’re talking about those that fell first to the conquering armies. So those that were probably intermixed the most, those who felt the most distantly connected, and again, that familiar unfamiliar. We feel that today again.
There’s probably some co-worker that drives you up the wall who has a lot of shared interests and a lot of shared concerns, but the things that are different drive you crazier than someone who’s just totally different. Right? Sometimes it’s our friends, right? The friend that has a lot more parallels with us, but a few differences—those differences stand out.
And for the Jews of the first century, those who were kind of still interested in the God of the Old Testament, but had corrupted it and weren’t really holding on to it very well, they were the worst, bad to be a Gentile, worse to be sort of a voluntary Gentile.
So what do we see? Matthew pretty much off the bat says, look, Jesus came into the world, Christmas happened. For Jews, yes, he’s the King of the Jews. And for the sort of not quite Jews anymore, and for those who never were, he came for all of us.
The promise in Isaiah over and over and over again, given before the exile, what does Isaiah want the people to know? That Jesus comes to restore. Yes, he’s not going to forget the promise of the Davidic kingdom, that David’s descendants would be on the throne forever. Jesus didn’t forget that, but he came to expand their mission. There was more.
This then comes back to what Jim read at the beginning, and then what we see picked up again in Isaiah 49:6. It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to rise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel. I will make you as a light for the nations that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.
There’s something we need to say very clearly. Jesus didn’t reject the Jews. Feels like I want to make that point here a little bit more strongly than sometimes, because we’ve seen some really ugly anti-Semitic things over recent years. We need to say that is abhorrent and utterly outside of what Christians should do and say and think. It is incompatible with scripture.
What we’re talking about here is not a rejection of the Jews, but an expansion of the kingdom of the Jews to include more than Jews. That Jesus, yes, he’s the Messiah, in other words, the Jewish king, but that kingdom wasn’t meant to just only contain Jews. The Jews were called to be a light, a nation of priests, a holy nation.
And the idea that God isn’t rejecting them, that God isn’t rejecting the disciples who, guess what, are Jewish, by sending himself, the Son coming into the world as a Jewish human being, he’s not rejecting them. He’s saying, okay, let’s get on. I’m doing an action. Now it’s time for your reaction. It’s time to go and do what you’ve always been made to do.
I didn’t choose a little people here so that you could remain a little people here. I chose a little people here so you’d light up the world with the promise of my love.
So the Magi show up, okay, here they are. They come from far off, foreign, different, not exactly open-feeling places then or now, and on and on. But it doesn’t mean that it was easy for the disciples then.
We have Acts 10. Peter is struggling with this, right? He has a vision. Jesus is sending him off to go and preach to a God-fearing man, someone who is already trying to move towards the God of the Bible. He already believes in the God of the Bible, but he’s a Gentile, and Peter says, whoa, wait a second here. The guy says, don’t call unclean what I have called clean. He sends Peter to go minister to this man, Cornelius.
Now that’s not rejection of Peter, and it’s not rejection of Jewish followers in Jesus who make up the early church, right? The majority of the early church, first believers, they’re all Jewish. The disciples are all Jews or other tribes of Israel that have converged in Judea, the only remaining faithful part. We get to the Apostle Paul, he’s a Benjamite, for example. But they’re ministering to these Gentiles now.
Peter struggles with it. The guy says, nope, go and do it.
So that I don’t mess up this recording, I’m not going to refer to the name of that smart speaker system that we all know that comes from Amazon. But I jokingly referred to that same speaker on Monday night when she decided to go off at an inopportune time in the middle of our Steadfast Livestream.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the different things that she’s quote unquote aware of and not aware of. And one of the interesting things, my light started going on and off. I woke up several times over the last week to the lights in my room blazing full brightness. And I was like, what in the world is going on?
And then I turn on a light during the evening when I was intending to be awake and the lights would go off. I thought, is that smart speaker that shall not be named doing this? And nowadays, the new plus version that just came out of the software, you can ask her a question. She’ll actually converse with me.
I said, her name, are you dimming and turning on lights automatically when I’m not asking you to? And she said, well, let me look at my routines. And so she looked, you can automate things. And she’s looking through the list and said, no, I’m not doing that. I don’t have any routines that turn on your lights, say at 4:30 in the morning. Not doing that.
But she lost sight of what she was doing. Because after a lot more digging, it turned out there’s a mode on her that’s called away mode. And in away mode, it will simulate lights turning on and off over time. So it’s like a really sophisticated set of timers that you use to plug in when you’re going on a trip. It will make lights go on at different times. So there’s not a clear pattern. So if someone’s looking to break into your house, it looks like someone’s there and that was on.
So part of what she was doing was this thing, but she’d lost sight of it. And as God’s people over time, we lose sight of part of what God’s doing. We say, no, that’s not what I’m doing. I’m just doing this little part. I’m turning on the lights when I’m supposed to. And so I turn on the lights for believers. I turn on lights for God’s people.
That’s what the disciples struggled with. And it’s what we struggle with today because, okay, we get the point because probably most of not all of us here tonight are Gentile. We’re not Jewish. If you are a Jewish believer, just bear with me for a moment here on this point.
So for those of us that are Gentile, it’s somewhat easy for us to kind of get the point that Gentile is supposed to be included because we feel like we’re included. We’re part of God’s people. Right. Okay. We got that.
Sometimes that’s then where it goes wrong in the way I was talking about a few minutes ago. But then we forget, okay, now we’re part of the people, but we’re supposed to go beyond that and keep reaching more people. We’re not supposed to be a really nice place where we minister to each other. We’re supposed to be that, but we’re not supposed to only be that. We’re supposed to do more.
We forget the larger picture that God’s working beyond the little set of routines that we already have. My smart speaker only looked at the routines and not the other things that might turn on and off lights.
And as we see God in the world, we sometimes forget, sometimes he’s calling us into Zebulun or Naphtali, or he’s calling magi into our life, people from completely different places. And he’s intending to reach them as well. We find our own limits and we forget the larger picture.
And by our own limits, I mean, we find those places where we’re comfortable, where it seems unreachable to us. Now I’ll say one of them, Afghanistan feels very unreachable to me because it’s so hard to get into it. There’s so little infrastructure. I mean, even Iran, as restrictive as they are, there’s people that can get around the different filters and stuff and maybe read something online about Jesus.
But what do you do for Afghanistan? And so there’s different things like that, but you know, here’s the practical thing. I don’t feel like I’m called, at least in the perceivable future, that I’m aware of to foreign missions. So I’m not considering, do I need to prepare to go to Afghanistan? I’m not doing that. You’re probably not either.
But where are the borders for us that we actually do encounter? A lot of times it’s the magi that show up, right? Who wanders into our life, who seems completely different than us, who doesn’t get the gospel yet, who, for every reason, we’d be just easier to stay in our nice, careful bounds. But God’s saying, the gospel’s for that person too. How do we find those people and share with them?
Who are our Gentiles, so to speak? The full-fledged Gentiles, the sort of half-Gentile people? Who are all those people for us that are outside our church that God’s calling us, okay, now go to them? And how on this new year do we invite them, pray for them, seek to watch what’s going on in their lives and point to God for them?
You know what? It feels dangerous. It might have felt a little odd to Mary and Joseph as these magi showed up. It certainly felt dangerous to Peter. It felt dangerous, and we’re going to see this more next week, for those who were watching what was happening in Acts 13, as the mission continues to blow up outside of the synagogue and the comfort of that.
Verse 48 of Acts 13 says, “And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing, because now they’re being told it’s for them as well, and glorifying the word of the Lord, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed. And the word of the Lord was spreading throughout the whole region.”
Here’s the thing. Jesus came for the world, and he does reach the world. We’re going to think more tomorrow night about how Jesus does both completeness and it’s completed that he, that what we’re talking about here is something that he’s already done, and I hope you’ll join me for that. But tonight, let’s just think about this aspect.
We talk about Jesus reaching the world, the fact that we’re here in the middle of the United States, talking about Jesus, and talking about the Bible, shows that Jesus reaches the world, because we were far-flung. I mean, how do you get to North America from Israel in the first century? We were far-flung. They weren’t even thinking about us. That’s really foreign, right? But here we are.
And who believed? All those appointed by God. It wasn’t up to the disciples to decide who should be and who shouldn’t be, but God was saying, I’m going to use you to reach the people I’ve appointed, and that’s the same thing he’s saying today.
I’m going to turn on the lights. I’m going to turn off the lights. I’m going to be doing these things. I want you to embrace it and be aware of it and run with it and not deny it. And it’s just quieting.
Again, next week, we’re going to get more into the reaction that’s negative from the Judaizers, those who say, wait a second, why are you including all these Gentiles? But the first part is to recognize that God is including the Gentiles. God is going to keep us going, he’s going to keep sending us, and the question is, what are we going to do? What are we going to do with him and the invitation he has to go and to reach beyond where we’re comfortable with the magi that wanders into the office, who takes a temporary position at the company? And you think, well, he’s so different, she’s so different, do I share anything or not?
Got me thinking about when we started here as a church, how different the whole story of Little Hills. I’m not going to go over the whole thing again, but I can say this, a lot of people looked at it and said, that’s never going to be a church. And then the first few years, we were online only.
And for those of us fully immersed in it, it felt like, yeah, this is a church happening. But sometimes people say, well, but you’re not meeting in person, you’re not really a church. But look at what God’s done, it’s kind of ironic, here I am online tonight, on the screen with you. Some of you are in person, some of you aren’t, but we’re all together as the church.
And at each stage, people doubted this, and yet we saw what God was doing. And sometimes intentionally and sometimes being dragged along because we didn’t know what God was doing, but he did. He’s gotten us to this point, and he’s going to keep guiding us, he’s appointed, he’s the one working. He’s placed us here, the question is, why is he placed us here? Who are our Gentiles? Who are our Magi?
The gospel keeps taking those who seem marginal, and plans that seem marginal, and bringing them into the undeniable. That’s what he’s doing with us. Now that servant that was going to bring light to the world, that’s Jesus, but it’s also his people.
Take a look at Isaiah 44:1. But now hear, O Jacob, my servant, Israel, whom I have chosen. And something that has been observed a lot on Isaiah, he sometimes uses the servant to refer to Jesus. For example, Isaiah 52 and 53, that’s very familiar at Easter time, about him taking on our sins for us, and the wounds that heal us. And other times, like here in Isaiah 44, he’s talking about his people.
Why? Because the King leads his people, and the King is leading us. He’s the light that brings light to the Gentiles, who called the Magi there, who made it so that there were Gentiles that were appointed in Acts 13, and every single moment since then has expanded his kingdom. But we’re the ones that he then sends to give that light to the world.
The gospel’s about restoring us, but it’s about so much more than restoring us. It’s about us then being on Jesus’s restoring mission for the whole world. So much bigger, so much more amazing than what we often think. And it’s intimidating, and it’s scary, and I don’t know all that God has in store for us just in 2026, much less the years ahead here at Little Hills, but I know that he has a mission for us.
He’s called us to be lights in places that we haven’t even thought of yet, in places we might resist. We’re supposed to go proclaim the good news, that people can repent and believe the good news and be saved. And he invites us into that. Jesus invites us into it, because he invites, and he sends his church on a mission to bring forth that invitation.
Let’s pray as a church that we can do this. Will you pray with me, please? Father, thank you for this evening. Lord, thank you for the good news that you give that restores us. And thank you also for the good news that you have for others that we may not even know yet, or we have stayed away from, or we don’t understand, but you’ve called us to be light in this world to help them to know you.
Would you help us to do that as a church and as individuals in this new year? And to restore us, if we’re not yet believers, we need to start there, that we believe the gospel and are restored ourselves. But then would you help us to be those who shine light into the world? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
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