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When you prepare a small dinner and twenty guests arrive unannounced, you wish you’d known what was coming—yet knowing what to prepare isn’t the only kind of readiness that matters. Luke 1 tells of a righteous priest who knew exactly what God expected of him, yet when God himself appeared with news he’d prayed decades to hear, he found himself unprepared to simply listen.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon opens with a food preparation illustration—too little food for a crowd, too much for no one—to make the point that even good preparation misses the mark when it doesn’t match the moment. Where in your own life are you most tempted to do the right things without asking whether they are the right things for right now?
Zechariah was blameless before God, yet when Gabriel appeared he could not receive the word. What is the difference between doing the right things and being genuinely ready to hear God? In what areas of religious life—church attendance, Bible reading, service, prayer—might faithful routine quietly become a substitute for actual attentiveness to God’s voice?
The sermon contrasts Zechariah’s response with Mary’s. Both asked “how,” but Mary trusted while Zechariah doubted. What made the difference in their faith, and what does that suggest about the kind of trust God is looking for when He speaks into circumstances that seem impossible?
Martha was serving Jesus while Mary sat at His feet. The sermon argues the problem was not Martha’s work but her priorities. How do we discern when good and necessary tasks have become distractions from what matters most? What does spiritual triage look like in a busy season?
Zechariah’s enforced silence gave him time to reflect before he responded faithfully by naming his son John. Have you experienced a season when God seemed to slow or stop your normal activity? What did that period teach you about listening?
The sermon closes by asking whether people encounter us and see religious routine or evidence that God is actively at work. What would it look like for your life to bear the kind of witness Zechariah’s small act of faithfulness did—turning the wonder of others toward God rather than toward you?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
During this season, speaking of being encouraged, we’re always encouraged when we come to God’s word, and so let’s go ahead and prepare our hearts to turn there now.
Anyone here host a Christmas party so far this season? You? Anyone still planning to? Yeah? Anyone hosted one in the past? Anyone planning to host one in the future? There we are. Okay, we should have everyone covered here. And if you have, kind of nice to know what to expect as far as who’s coming, right? Would you do anything different, for example, if you were hosting a party for 3 people versus what you might do if you were hosting a party for 30 people? Anything a little different? A little bit? Tiny bit? Yeah, a little bit.
So, you go and you think you have a few people coming over and you get the smallest little ham, right? And a couple side dishes and you’re preparing that. And, oh, I just happened to bring 20 of my best friends. Is that okay? They weren’t trying to eat, right? Yeah, you wanted to know if you’re going to have a lot of food.
On the other hand, you prepare a lot of food, right? You have to spend days and days preparing food and more food and no one shows up. Well, that’s not so good either, right? It helps to be able to hear what’s coming so that you actually prepare what needs to be prepared.
There’s nothing wrong with preparing 10 pounds of potatoes. Well, anytime, really. But especially if you have a bunch of people coming. On the other hand, you’re going to end up throwing, even I’d probably end up, sadly throwing some away if no one comes, right? The disaster, tragedy—throwing away potatoes. Say with ham, we get 20 pounds of ham and no one shows up, that’s a lot of waste. But if you have 30 people, well, you need it.
So we need to know, we need to hear. Even if buying a little or a lot could be right in a certain context, we need to hear what’s right in the context we’re in. And I believe tonight as we come to the story of Zechariah, one of the things that we’re challenged to do is not just be thinking about what are the right things to be doing before our God, but what are the right things to be doing right now before our God?
Because we’re coming to the story of a man who isn’t really known for doing wrong things. We’ll see more of that in a moment. And yet he isn’t necessarily prepared to do the right things of that moment. And too often that’s where we find ourselves too.
So let’s pray that God would help us to be receptive to what he’s saying in this moment. And then from there we’ll dig into his word. Let’s pray.
Father, we do pray that you would help us to be people who are receptive to you. People who hear what you are doing. Lord, would you help us not to get off track? Would you help us to see when we are, to hear when we are? Help us to be people of faith who proceed following you based on what you are calling us to be and to do. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Let’s go ahead and dig into the beginning. This is right at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, verse 5 and following. Let’s go ahead and take a look there.
In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah of the division of Abijah, and he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. They were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord. But because they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren and both were advanced in years.
Now, while he was serving as priest before God when his division was on duty, according to the custom of the priesthood, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense. And there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing on the right side of the altar of incense, and Zechariah was troubled when he saw it. And fear fell upon him. But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great before the Lord and he must not drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb. He will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and the power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared.”
Sounds like pretty good news, doesn’t it? So let’s just get into Zechariah’s mindset for a moment. He has a big day here. He’s the one chosen to offer the incense. And he’s in the Lord’s presence, in the holy of holies. Here he is going into the temple, doing something that’s a pinnacle of everything he’s been doing and will do as a priest of Israel. It’s the day he’s been waiting for.
And what we’re told about Zechariah and his wife, Elizabeth, is they’re blameless. Now, we know theologically, if we really want to get into it, nobody’s perfect. Nobody’s blameless in that sense completely spotless, free of sin. But in the standard of looking at people who keep God’s law, they were known as lawkeepers. This phrase here is the same one used to speak of Noah in Genesis 6:9 and the same one used to speak of Job in Job chapter one.
So they were really, really good people. No one was looking at them and able to say, “There’s the sin, that’s the reason why Zechariah and Elizabeth didn’t have children.” And yet, in this society, the assumption was if you didn’t have children, there must be some problem, some sin, some reason God’s judgment came upon you. That was the assumption. We’re told it wasn’t true, but that’s the assumption.
And so imagine them for a moment. Here Zechariah is, he’s getting to do this amazing thing as priest, but he knows as people look at him, maybe even though he’s walking into the temple that day, there’s probably someone who said, “Zechariah and Elizabeth, they don’t have any children. I wonder what it is they did? What is it that caused God not to favor?”
And yet, despite that, despite the doubts of society, despite the fact that they waited and waited and waited and waited beyond the years that they thought it was even possible, what Zechariah had done was to continue to do what the Lord had called him to do. He was still blameless. He hadn’t snubbed his nose at God and said, “Well, God, if you won’t answer my prayers, if you won’t give us a child, then I am not going to be a priest any longer. I’m going off to Vegas or something.”
He doesn’t do that. He keeps plowing along. He knows God’s law, keeps doing it. But after all that, the way he holds on in faith, he doesn’t have faith here as he encounters the angel of the Lord. Take a look at verse 18.
Zechariah said to the angel, “How shall I know this? For I am an old man and my wife is advanced in years.” And the angel answered him, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day these things take place because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.”
And the people were waiting for Zechariah, they were wondering as he lay at the temple. When he came out, he was unable to speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the temple, and he kept making signs to them and remained mute. And when his time of service was ended, he went to his home.
After these days, his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months, she kept herself hidden, saying, “Well, we’ll get to that in a moment,” actually. Let’s stop there for the time.
Gabriel tells them the truth. And it’s exactly what they’ve been praying. And Zechariah is in the place where he’s supposed to encounter the Lord when he hears this. He’s not at a supermarket chopping for a few supplies for dinner that night. He’s not off at synagogue even teaching the law or listening to some rabbi talk about the law. He’s not doing that. He’s serving the God of the universe, offering the incense. He’s right there, supposed to be encountering God.
And what do you know? God sends an angel. Here’s the moment God’s actually going to speak to him in a way that many of us have prayed that God would speak to us, that we would actually hear a message from God, not just, “I think God’s moving me this way or that way,” but an actual message from God.
While serving God, as a man who is thought to be blameless before God, in that moment Zechariah says, “How could I know you’re really telling me the truth? I don’t think this can’t be right. Did you get the message wrong, Gabriel? Maybe you didn’t look at the tracking information. Maybe you’re delivering the mail to the wrong address. You might be a couple digits off. Surely, surely don’t mean me.”
Sort of interesting when you think about it. The crowd standing outside, when they see Zechariah, they know the delay, they say, “Wow, Zechariah has had a vision. God’s been speaking to him,” but Zechariah even as he’s seeing the angel, he says, “You’re kind of scary. I mean, I feel fear. This isn’t normal. But you’re going to have to show me something if you want me to believe what you’re saying.”
You know, it’s like Abraham does when Abraham’s given a similar message. He doubts, like Sarah does when she’s given that message. What he doesn’t do is respond with the confidence that Mary does that we were looking at last week.
There are two parallel stories in the first chapter of Luke. Mary wants to know how it’s going to work. She wants to know exactly how God’s going to do this. She’s curious. She wants to understand more clearly how God’s working. But Zechariah says, “I just don’t think you understand. We’re old. We’re not gonna have kids. Gabriel, it’s a nice thought. Maybe you got delayed a few years ago or a decade ago when I was at the temple. Maybe you meant to show up then, and because you’re heavenly and you don’t know how time works and so on, because you don’t experience it. You are a spiritual being. You showed up here instead. Maybe that’s what happened. I don’t know what happened. All I know is that we’re old. We’re not going to have any kids. If you’re going to do something really weird and different and amazing, then how about a sign? Because otherwise, again, I know you’re an angelic being, you don’t understand how all this stuff works, but I’m a human being. I understand it. It’s not going to happen.”
And do we really blame Zechariah? It’s been around for a while. Maybe there have even been people in the village that have come up to them that knew them and they said, “You know, I know that God hasn’t given you a child, but I know the two of you. We know that you are committed to doing God’s, we’re following his word and doing his law. And so we’re sure—you know, I just feel like God’s going to give you a child this year.” Maybe they’d heard that year after year and it doesn’t happen and they say, “You know, I… who knows how angels work, but is this just the same thing?”
The Lord himself was speaking to Zechariah, but Zechariah is not ready to hear. And so all the right stuff he’s been doing, all the blamelessness, all the ritual, all the lawkeeping, it’s all the right stuff, nothing wrong with it. But as a professor of mine once said when a lot of us had been filling out an exam and we put down a great answer but to the wrong question, said it was the right stuff, it was just the wrong right stuff. Because what had God been preparing Zechariah for here? He’d been preparing Zechariah for this moment, this moment when he and Elizabeth are going to become the parents of the messenger who foretells the coming of the Savior. And all that righteousness, all that commitment to God’s law—it was crucial; it was preparation. So as they raise up John, John is learning what matters to the Lord. They’re going to be preparing the one who prepares the way.
So it was all relevant. But in this moment, the right stuff that God was calling Zechariah to was, hear what I’m saying to you. You hear what I’m saying? Believe what I’m saying.
At that moment, Zechariah knows all his duties. He’s been doing those. What he’s not ready for is to listen to God. God, I’m too busy doing your work to hear you right now. Come back later.
Note here, the criticism of Zechariah isn’t that he was doing good, that he was committing the acts he was supposed to commit as a priest. That was good. When God calls us to follow his word, and he does, we should do it. Zechariah should have been doing what he was doing. The only thing that he missed is he was so focused on that, he was so focused on checking off the boxes that the Lord expected of him. What he didn’t hear, what he wasn’t ready for is to actually hear God. That’s the thing that God wants from us most is that we would hear him.
It’s not an excuse to ignore what he says is good and say, “Well, I’m hearing God, so I don’t need to do what God says. I’m hearing God. I’m receptive when I’m not doing what God says. I’ll just go and commit some sins because when I’m over here, I’m in sin and I’m not stressed by trying to do what he wants. No problem. It’s easier to hear him.”
No, he’s not saying that. What he’s saying is when you are following me, just don’t forget the fact that it’s not that I’m asking you to be mechanically following me. It’s that I want a relationship with you, and I want you to be in the right place, doing the right frame of things that put you in the right frame of mind so that you can hear me, so that we can be in communion together.
And when God’s calling us to follow this law, it’s not that we’re earning a place before him. It’s that he’s asking us to set aside the things that get in the way of a relationship with Him and the things that constantly occupy us and distract us.
But for Zechariah here, in this moment at least, the very things that are meant to prepare him to hear from the Lord, become the distraction. Not that he should quit doing them, but he forgot what he was supposed to be doing even more.
What was the right duty in that moment? Well, it wasn’t just spreading incense. Yes, that was what he’d been sent in to do, but now as he encounters the angel of the Lord, what’s his right duty? His right duty is to respond to God’s word. Encounter an angel of the Lord.
If you really encounter an angel of the Lord, one thing that’s very clear in a moment like this when an angel, the Lord wants you to know that he’s an angel, the Lord, you know that he’s an angel. You don’t have to ask for identification to a genuine angel of the Lord when he’s revealing himself to you.
There are times that we’re told that we entertain angels unawares. There are times throughout the Old Testament that God is working around people and they don’t necessarily know immediately. But certainly in a moment like this when something happens and Zechariah sees Gabriel, there’s no doubt in his mind that there’s something miraculous happening here. He doesn’t feel, he’s not troubled and he doesn’t feel fear because someone wandered in with him. He feels that because he knows that he’s in a holy presence.
And in that place, in that experience, we need to hear. Not always an angel.
Later on in the Gospel of Luke chapter 10, we encounter Mary and Martha, and a similar problem in the context of being with Jesus.
Luke 10, verse 38: Now, as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village, and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. She had a sister called Mary who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving, and she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.”
But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”
Jesus is traveling in ministry. We obviously jump a few decades here. He’s traveling in ministry. He stops at his friend’s house. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. He stops at their house, and of course, you want to honor Jesus if he’s coming. You want a host.
And incidentally, it doesn’t even matter in the ancient world if it happens to be the Savior of the world that stops in your house. If anyone stops in your house, if you have company, you take care of them. You make sure they get a good meal, that they’re comfortable, that they get whatever they need to drink, they need to stay overnight, they get the bedding that they need. That everything, your responsibility is to be a good host.
And so Martha gets that. And she looks at her sister and says, “You know, I’m taking care of these disciples and taking care of Jesus. And Mary over there? Mary is just sitting there listening to Jesus. Doesn’t she know what it means to be a hostess? Come on, Jesus, snap her to help her to understand that there’s responsibility here.”
It doesn’t go the way we expect. Jesus doesn’t say, “Good job, Martha. Mary, quit being a lazy bum just sitting here talking to me. Go and make me some food.” He doesn’t say that. And incidentally, that would sound kind of odd with the time, so to speak, today, right? “Mary, your place is in the kitchen. Go in there.” No, no.
But this time, it was unusual, even if everything were done for a rabbi, for a male teacher of God’s word, to want women around listening. And here Mary has just been enraptured and listening to Jesus, and Jesus says she’s the one that’s made the right choice.
I don’t think the message you’re to take away is if people come over, tell them to fend for themselves. I think the problem is the level to which Martha has allowed this to become her focus. She’s so busy taking care of hosting that she’s forgotten about the one she’s hosting. And I believe that same sort of problem that we see with Zechariah: So busy doing all the priestly stuff, all the right rituals, his mind’s so focused on that that he can’t actually hear when God himself knocks him on the head with an angel appearing.
And we may not have that experience, but we do have the experience that a lot of times when God is speaking to us, we’re so distracted even doing the right things, even doing the things that God wants us to do, that we’re not ready to actually hear what God is saying in that moment.
The point isn’t that these things are bad to do. The point is we need to remember what’s most important. Mary remembers what’s most important. And he wants us to remember what’s most important.
I was reading this week about the development of triage. There’s apparently some debate exactly where that whole process of medical treatment first originated, but there’s a lot of records in Napoleon’s France to suggest that the basic outline of how it worked was developed in a series of stages.
There have been a number of big battles, a number of setbacks for the French army, and over time, from 1792 to 1806, they kept trying to refine a way to improve the efficiency of their army. And one of the ways you improve the efficiency of your army is you don’t let people die. Because the more people that die, the smaller your army is, the less effective it is.
So at first, as they were deploying different medics to try to lessen this, they thought, “Well, what we need to do is make sure the officers don’t die. We need to take care of the VIPs and make sure they survive the battle, so they’re ready for the next battle.”
So they’d go and treat the officers, and even though you had the lesser soldiers out there, the ones that weren’t as high of rank, getting far more severely injured, they would treat the officers with whatever injuries that they had first. And then you were still losing all these soldiers that had much more severe injuries. They just didn’t have the rank to entitle themselves to rapid medical care.
And over time, a few doctors that were very influential in the French army started to push to focus the attention of medical care a little differently. First, they tried treating whomever they thought was most useful in battle next. You’re going to go into another battle; you have certain people with expertise or certain people more likely to recover to go and fight again. Well, you could treat those people.
And ultimately, they settled on something that’s a lot more like what we think of with triage today. By 1806, we have documentation that they started to treat people based on the severity of their injuries first. You go and you treat the people that need the medical attention most first. And it worked.
And then we saw that technique move out into other armies. For example, by the Civil War, the American army had adopted this technique of triage.
And now today, someone says, “Well, I’m trying to triage things,” and it doesn’t mean that they’re a doctor necessarily. It means that whatever they’re dealing with, they’re going to make sure they do the most important thing first. It’s common sense, and yet a lot of times we need to be reminded of it.
Aren’t there times that we have a bunch of things to do and we don’t start with the most important? And we need to say, “Oh, I need to do some triage. I need to actually think, well, what to do first? What’s most urgent? What if I don’t do it is going to spoil things that I don’t want to spoil?” And we do triage.
And that is the problem, I believe, for Zechariah. Here’s a whole list of things he needs to do for God. And somewhere down on the list, I’m sure he’d say listening to God is an important thing, having faith in what God tells you is an important thing.
But as he’s going through the list, he’s saying, “I’m doing this incense, I’ve lived blamelessly, even though we haven’t had any children and people wonder why we aren’t having children and what’s going on. I’ve done all this.” Those are the things I’m doing. And what he’s not ready for is the most important thing, which is, as he’s encountering God, to actually listen to God.
What Martha isn’t ready for, she’s hosting Jesus is to understand, “Yes, of course, it’d be good to have some food for Jesus and the disciples. That would be a good thing to do. But make sure that you understand the most important opportunity you’re going to have in this moment is to spend time with Jesus. Don’t miss that.”
The Christmas story, we see some people that do know exactly what to do, and those people would be the shepherds.
Luke chapter 2 verse 15: When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.”
They’re on duty. They could say, “Let’s take care of our flocks until someone else can take over. And then if we have time, we might be kind of tired. Maybe we should do it a few days from now. But if we have time, let’s go and check out what the angels did.” No, they say, “Let’s go right now. Let’s go and see what’s going on because angels have just appeared to us.”
Maybe it’s important that we just trust that if angels appear to us, there’s something really important that God wants us to know about and he wants us to experience it.
And so they go. They take care of their flock. That was a good thing. No one would say a shepherd taking care of his flock is a bad thing. No one has ever been accused of being an irresponsible shepherd for wanting his flock to survive, for not wanting to lose the sheep.
But when the angel of the Lord or in this case, the angels of the Lord appear and say, “A Savior is born,” that good thing isn’t the best thing. Good thing is a good thing, but even better is to go and see the Savior.
A lot of times, we may not have angels, but we have messages from God. “Hey, I’m working. I want you to respond.”
And we’re so busy, we’re not ready. And we say, “Hold on, God, I’ll get there.”
And we’re more like going up to the deli counter and getting the little selectomatic ticket. And we’re 20 numbers away from being served with this important thing.
And we are someone looking out and saying, “Okay, I know I need to do this and this and God wants me to be faithful, he wants me to follow him. But first and foremost, if God starts speaking, I need to just pause and listen. And then figure out how do I do what’s right and righteous in response to that particular thing that God’s chosen to break in with.”
What do we do if we do miss it? Have we thwarted God’s plan then? Are we ruining God’s plan? Would God’s kingdom be so much better if not for us?
I think we have some hope here, thankfully. We need some hope, right? Because we’re going to make mistakes, but we have some hope here.
What happens to Zechariah? Because what Gabriel doesn’t say to Zechariah is, “Okay, you don’t have faith, fine. It won’t happen. Be that way. We’ll go find another priest and his wife who have been praying for a child. And the other priest and the other wife of a priest, they’re going to be the ones that will see this promise.”
No, Gabriel says, “God’s gonna do this. But you’re not going to speak until your son is born.”
Verse 59, let’s fast forward to when John is born. And on the eighth day, they came to circumcise the child. And they would have called him Zechariah after his father, but his mother answered, “No, he shall be called John.” They said, “None of your relatives are called by this name.” And they made signs to the father inquiring what he wanted him to be called.
And he asked for a writing tablet and wrote, “His name is John.” They all wondered. And immediately his mouth was opened, and his tongue was loosed, and he spoke blessing God. And fear came on all their neighbors, and all these things were talked about throughout the hill country of Judea. And all who heard them laid them up in their hearts, saying, “What then will this child be? For the hand of the Lord was with him.”
This is really amazing because we tend to think, “Okay, if I’ve missed an opportunity, then God’s just going to discard me. He’s not going to use me.” But here we’ll remind us when we do finally respond.
God doesn’t say, “Well, you didn’t get it perfectly right, so I’m not going to use you.” When’s the best time to respond to God? When he’s speaking to us. When he’s right there, when his spirit’s nudging us one way or the other, when that’s happening, that’s the best time.
But the next best time is whenever you realize you haven’t been—to stop, to walk out of the kitchen and sit down at Jesus’ feet and hear what he’s saying.
And Zechariah might have been disinclined to listen for a period of time. God gives them some time to be silent. You can’t speak. He literally can’t speak. It’s not just he decides to go on a retreat and find himself or something. No, he’s forced into it, but…
In that time, he doesn’t grow bitter that God’s done that to him. No, he thinks about what Gabriel has said and he said, “Okay, Gabriel said it, the Lord gave me this message. Now I’m going to respond.”
And we see that in the naming of John because while today, people like to come up with creative names for their kids and we see there isn’t often a big push to have kids carry the same names generation after generation after generation. And oftentimes the biggest push is not to use any of the names that were used in the previous generation at all, not even of related members of the family, but just not to use the same names. And we see all kinds of new names coming up.
And this time, the great honor was passing down a name.
And so when Zechariah and Elizabeth say, “We’re going to name him John,” people aren’t just saying, “Oh, well, tell us the story. We’d like to know why you’ve chosen the name John.” They’re saying, “What? You’re crazy. You’ve been praying all this time for a child. You finally get that child and you’re going to waste that child’s name.”
Zechariah Jr. is right there in front of you. What, why, you know, what… what’s the problem in communication here?
Elizabeth says it, but the people say, “Well, she’s a woman. She’s been through a lot. Maybe we shouldn’t listen to her.”
Zechariah, he can’t speak, and he doesn’t maybe at this time even wondered a little bit, “I wonder if God really is ever going to allow me to speak again.”
But he’s taken that desire to follow the Lord that he had been doing, and he is now filtered into desiring to follow the Lord specifically where God has called him in this moment. And he says, “Here’s what I know I need to do. I need to motion for a tablet. I need that because I need to write this down. I don’t want the people to name our son ignoring my wife and name our son something incorrect. He needs to be called John.”
And so they bring the tablet. He writes down and he writes it in an emphatic way. He says it as clearly as possible, not just, “I’d kind of like to call him John.” No, John is his name. I don’t want any debate on this. That’s who he is.
And in that, as he has to struggle to actually say the very thing that he was told to do, Zechariah is allowed to speak.
And in those two mysteries—the regaining of his voice and the naming of the child—the people around him, what do they do? They’re filled with wonder. They’re filled with fear of the Lord. And as he praises God, they praise God. And they start to say, “Wait a second, God is working here. There’s something happening here.”
And in that little bit of faithfulness, of all the faithfulness that Zechariah had done over his life, I would imagine as a young man he never thought, “The most faithful act that I will do, the one that will be recorded for all eternity is that I named my son John.”
And yet that’s the act that he does where he’s listening.
And in that quiet little moment of faithfulness, God allows him to testify to how God is working. And in that testimony of how God is working, others hear it and see it, and God builds on that little bitty drop of faithfulness for a man who was struggling just a little while to walk in faith. And he takes that to testify and to start the buildup to when Jesus’ ministry is going to begin.
You think about it, people praise God over Zechariah and his faithfulness here and his regaining of his voice to praise God, to testify to what John’s name should be, so they give thanks over John and people eventually come to John, and they give thanks to the message coming through John. The Lord has not forgotten his people. They’re speaking. And then ultimately people are able to praise God because Jesus has come, and John is the one who points to Jesus and says, “He’s the one that saves the world.”
So this little drop of faithfulness turns into so much more.
As we go into this new year, we carry both our successes and our failures. Those places where we have been receptive to the Lord and we’ve done what God wants and those places where we haven’t been.
Here’s the thing though, the fact that we haven’t been doesn’t mean that we must continue to fail.
Zechariah doesn’t get it right initially, but he turns. And in that turning and in doing something amazing even in the midst of his failure—and ultimately, we know about his failure—do we really want those times that we miss what the Lord’s doing to be recorded in his Word for everyone to read every Christmas time from now until Jesus returns? Would any of us aspire to that? Well, no.
But I kind of think Zechariah probably told everyone himself because he had now witnessed what God was doing and it wasn’t about him and his pride, it was about God and his power. And in that God used what Zechariah said to point people to Him.
All of you know that I love Christmas decorations, and if you’ve been at Little Hills for a time, you also know that I don’t like taking down the Christmas decorations.
And I have to confess, the idea of having our winter forest, which we’ll have again in a few weeks, the driver to that was so pretty, we can’t take this all down yet.
And so we transition in January from Christmas to winter, and we have a winter forest by the window, and I love it every year. I love this right now as well.
But I’m just never quite ready. It always would make me sad as a kid. The neighbors would get a real tree, a live tree. And every December 26, not January, December 26th, the morning comes, you look out the window and there’s their tree in a bag right outside. It was like they couldn’t wait to get up and throw the tree out.
And it seems like a lot of our world today is anxious to throw the tree out, at least metaphorically.
Very few people seem to get live trees anymore but take down the artificial tree, take down the lights, turn off the Christmas music, move on.
And here I am. Okay, would you download the 12 Days of Christmas devotional booklet? Let’s keep this going a little longer.
But if we do it for the right reasons, as an excuse to remind people of something. We’re not doing it just for the decorations. Yeah, actually partly I am, but hopefully a lot more than that, that we’re doing it because we’re so excited about what God’s doing.
Now, people will notice our Christmas decorations for different reasons. Obviously in December, it’s often because they’re really pretty. January, “Oh, you’re one of those people that like to stretch out a little.” March, “Oh, you really are those people that like to stretch it out.” June, “Doesn’t the city code prohibit this, right?”
But it also depends why. We all know that house that has the lights still up outside in June, and it’s clear the reason they still have the lights up in June is they didn’t want to put in the effort, take the lights down and they’re kind of falling and forgotten.
Well, out in the countryside, very beginning of March last year, I took this video. Let me take a look at it.
This is March first, 2024.
Now, the reason I wanted to show this video to you, notice here, yes, it’s a house on March 1st in full Christmas mode. Here, let’s just see that again. There’s the house. Look at those lights. Look at all those lights. The trees, the flashing tree, the figures, the joy sign. I mean, they’re full on Christmas March first.
I’ve seen houses that still have Christmas lights up, but I can’t say I’ve seen very many houses that on March 1st have them up where they look so cared for.
I mean, this is a house you, if you’ve worked Christmas lights, you know it’s hard to keep them all on. Something goes out or whatever.
This is a house. I think those people probably were out sometime in late February, probably fixing a light bulb here and there and straightening the display and so on.
Here’s someone who is so excited about Christmas and living away from neighbors that might report them to the city or whatever that March 1st, they’re just jolly. And I don’t know if on July 1st, if you drive by at night, it also would be quite so jolly. I don’t know, but certainly on March 1st they’re just excited and they’re ready to testify about God’s goodness and have joy.
What’s so striking about it is how cared for it was. This was an intentional message. It was unusual, but it was intentional.
Now, whether you leave the tree up, and I’m not saying that’s the way to be a faithful Christian, you leave up your tree on March first, I’m not saying it isn’t. What I am saying is that we need to make sure we leave the joy up. We need to keep the real light up.
And that stands out too. That stood out because someone was actively caring. And when we don’t just have Christmas spirit at Christmas time but in March and June and September, we still act like we just had the best Christmas day ever.
People notice, like they know Zechariah naming his son something that didn’t seem like it should be. And the other thing, when people notice that in this, is they notice it’s the sort of thing you do when God’s speaking just like that crowd when Zechariah comes out, he can’t speak at that moment, but they look and they know, here is a man who’s encountered the Lord.
And the question is when people encounter us, we could be doing lots of right religious things. Show up at church, read our Bible, post things on social media, even every once in a while then make people see that we’re Christians. Play Christian radio. Someone’s getting in the car, you flip the radio to make sure it’s on Christian radio so they know that we’re Christians.
But when people see us, do they wonder, like, “Oh, you forgot to take down the Christmas decoration,” or do they wonder? I think probably a lot of people driving by that house, it’s the latter kind of wonder because it’s too intentional, is too well cared for. It’s not just laziness. This is a labor of love. For some reason, these people, they’re celebrating Christmas and that spirit hasn’t burnt out for them.
May that be how people encounter us? Not that we’re going through the motions, not that they know that we’re religious, but people wonder because they can see the Lord working in us. They can see the Holy Spirit in the things we do and the things we say. And they can see it not because we’re so strong and so good, but because we’re listening as the Lord’s speaking and we’re following him.
That’s the opportunity Zechariah had and ultimately takes. And when we respond to God encouraging us, other people see that response and he uses that to bring them into response as well.
May that be how we go out of this Christmas season? Would you pray with me?
Father, we do pray that you would help us to be people of faithfulness, people who respond. Lord, would you help us not just to be celebratory during the Christmas season but every day of the year to live as people with the hope of Christmas, every day to live as people who know that you have redeemed us.
As we do that, would you help us to be the sort of people that bring true wonder and amazement and praise of you? We ask this in Jesus’ precious name, Amen.
Thank you, Jackie.
As we come to the Lord’s table, one of the things that we always have to say, we always—and it seems kind of like, “Oh, we just talked about all this wonder and joy and now I’m going to say, well, here’s how you decide if you should take the element.” Feels kind of like an odd contrast.
But if you think about that, if you looked at that house I just showed, and you hate Christmas, you’re the Grinch of your neighborhood, but you say, well, it seems like people stop and take pictures and seem to notice that.
I’d imagine I’m not the only one that’s ever taken a picture of that or a video of that. I’ll put up lights too, and you just toss a bundle of lights out in the yard and plug it in and say, “I wonder why that doesn’t work.”
Well, it’s because you yourself don’t have wonder. You’re not encountering that joy of Christmas and wanting to make something beautiful and festive. You’re just trying to go through the motions.
And so it is with communion. If you haven’t come to know Jesus, if you don’t know who he is as your Lord and Savior, if you haven’t said, “Lord, I can’t get things right, I’m not just Zechariah doing everything right, but not always hearing you. I realize I have all this sin, all this brokenness, and I need you to help me with it.”
If you haven’t done that, it’s like taking communion is like tossing just a bundle of lights out in the yard and thinking that’s somehow going to work.
We need the joy. We need the electricity to plug in and the lights to come on. And we need to actually stretch them out and see what happens when the Lord’s working in our lives.
And so if you haven’t trusted him, make today the day that you do.
We all have that bundle of tangled-up lights, but ask God to untangle it and use you and be faithful.
If you’re online, there’s online church family members who’d love to pray with you.
All you need to do is ask Jesus to be your Lord and Savior, and he will be faithful.
And then come back next week and take this when it’s not just an extra bundle of wire. I was plugging into the joy of the one who came at Christmas.
So it was on the night he was betrayed Jesus took the bread and he broke it and he gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And likewise after supper, he took the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood poured out for you under the remission of sins.”
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