Maybe you’ve had a Christmas where the lights and the music were all there, but it felt like you were watching from the other side of a piece of glass—present for the season, yet not really in it. Isaiah 53 describes a Savior understands how we feel on that other side of the glass and came to break it.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor uses the metaphor of “glass” separating us from joy and celebration during difficult seasons. What does this metaphor mean to you, and can you think of a time when you’ve felt this separation? How did encountering Jesus change your experience of that separation?
The sermon connects Christmas and Easter as parts of the same redemptive story rather than separate celebrations. How does understanding Jesus’ birth in light of His crucifixion and resurrection change the way you approach Christmas, especially during difficult or painful seasons?
The pastor contrasts the formation of hail and snowflakes, suggesting that what appears to be “pollution” (dust/pollen) in our lives can be transformed by God into something beautiful and pure. Where might you be mistaking a “pure water” trajectory—in your own life or someone else’s—for something ultimately good, and how can embracing the “dust and pollen” of following Jesus lead to beauty and restoration?
The sermon emphasizes that Jesus “comes into the brokenness” rather than remaining distant from our pain, bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows from the manger onward. What does it mean practically to you that Jesus experienced rejection, despair, and suffering? How might actively entrusting your current burdens to Him shift your experience of worship or community this Christmas?
The pastor invites listeners to testify to how “God comes into the struggle with us” rather than pretending “we have it all together.” What practical steps can you take to “pass the light” to others who are hurting, and why might authentic vulnerability about our own struggles be more powerful than projecting an image of having everything figured out?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
We’re going to be turning to Isaiah 53 tonight, and as we do, we turn to a passage that we typically think about more at Easter time. But to the extent that we divide Christmas and Easter, we can leave that off for a moment still. Thanks, Jack. Oh, can you turn the light back on? Thanks. To the extent that we think of this passage at Easter and kind of divide the two, we’re really kind of missing something because Christmas and Easter are part of the same story. They’re part of the same action from God. The humble birth of our Savior is the starting point of the cross. And so it’s appropriate as we think about what Isaiah foretold, that he’s setting a tone not just for Easter, not just for Good Friday, but he’s setting a tone for Christmas.
Maybe you have an experience you think of in the past at Christmas time that was deeply troubling, painful. I think most of us probably over life find a Christmas or two that stick out in that way. It feels very icy because of that separation we create between Christmas and Easter. I could think of several. I was like, “Well, which one do I want to talk about?” And I found myself thinking back to Christmas about 20 years ago. Not long before Christmas, my dad ended up in the hospital needing heart surgery. And it’s weird. If you have a loved one in the hospital at Christmas and end up being bookends right before and after Christmas, it kind of feels like you’re experiencing the process of the season and yet not.
You see the lights. If you’ve made those sorts of trips to the hospital around Christmas time, I bet you have the same memory I do, which is you see the lights, but they feel so distant. Because while you see the decorations, maybe you hear the music, you stop in a restaurant to get something to eat and you hear the music playing or you’re invited over and you go someplace in the midst of all this and you hear music playing and people laughing and playing Christmas games and so on. And that’s all there. And yet you kind of feel like there’s a piece of glass between. There’s all that, almost like you’re watching on television or reading about it in a book. And there’s what you’re actually experiencing in that moment. Maybe you’re in that place right now.
Come into this year, into this Christmas, and maybe you lost a loved one this year. And even if it were months ago, you still walk through that process of “but Christmas is different this year.” Not once, but twice I’ve been in the process of losing a job right at Christmas time. And if you’re in that place, it’s weird, especially if it was something that you love to do, right? Because you’re maybe having to complete the Christmas activities even at the workplace. And yet you don’t really feel like it because there’s that ending. Maybe it’s your own health feeling uncertain this year. All kinds of things. Maybe it’s just the weariness we have from this world that seems so upside down so much of the time and that glass appears.
Here’s the good news. Here’s what we read in Isaiah 53. Jesus didn’t come to be on the other side of the glass from us. He comes into a gold plated manger as angel choirs sing more beautifully than the most beautiful Christmas choir. Jesus came to break the glass. Take a look at Isaiah 53 verse 1: “Who has believed what he has heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not.”
When we think about Christmas and separation from Easter, we find ourselves thinking of surely everyone’s excited. Even the most secular places in the world right now probably play at least a few sacred Christmas songs as part of the mix. At least an old holy night by some secular pop artist or something. Somewhere in there it shows up and so it just feels like the birth of Jesus penetrates into the darkest parts of the world in this moment. Praise God for that. But it wasn’t that way the first Christmas. The first Christmas God came into the world. He experienced what it was like to live as a human being, not starting out on the other side of that glass in that beautiful picture, but on the side with the brokenness that he could pierce that glass and break it for us.
Now, today when we go through that, whatever we’re going through, whatever we’re carrying, and it doesn’t have to be big things. Sometimes it’s just the accumulation of small things that feel like they’re weighing us down. We feel like we’re isolated and we’re on the other side of the glass as we watch the other people going about, and yet I think probably if we think about it we know, well, everyone’s carrying burdens. It’s not that there’s just one really awful situation or a few. There’s not just a few of us standing on the glass, on the other side of the glass trying to figure it out. No, we’re really all over there. Sometimes there’s glass around each of us, like we have our little thing, but we know we need to play our part at Christmas, and someone else has his or her thing, and they’re playing their parts respectively in their little glass dome, and Jesus comes to break all of them.
Christmas is about, oddly enough, suffering. The moment that God came into the world, he came into the world to suffer for us. And yes, the fulfillment, the ultimate picture of that is on the cross, but it isn’t the cross in isolation. The cross happens because of the manger. It’s not somehow just an unintended consequence. It’s the reason Jesus was born in the manger. And so whatever we carry into this Christmassy, we carry it to one who was rejected. Despised and rejected, viewed as not worth paying attention to. His appearance was of no concern to people. That makes us flashback, if you’ve been following along on Sunday nights, to our series and what we were talking about last week with King David and the selection of King David amongst his brothers. And even his father assumes, well, David, he’s the young kid out shepherding sheep. He’s not the one Samuel’s looking for to be king.
So David experienced a little bit of this. We don’t know all the conversations that happened in the family wall. Why that squirt? But we know they happened. We know that Jesse, David’s father, was so convinced that David was not the one of regard that he doesn’t even think to call him in when the other brothers are lining up to be selected by the prophet. While David’s greater son, David’s descendant, Jesus comes into the world, that’s even worse. At least David is in this family that has some siblings that someone could imagine could be a king. Jesus comes into the world unknown and of no regard. What David experienced, Jesus experiences more fully, in a greater fashion, in a more full fashion.
When we come into Christmas and we feel rejected, when we feel broken, we come knowing that he’s experienced. And while we experience small times where we feel like we’ve fallen off the stage of life, how much more so forgot himself coming into the world and experiencing those same things? He went from so much greater and so much more deserving of a place than we ever have and yet he experienced it for us.
There’s something else that struck me as I thought about that in relation to what we’re talking about tonight. If David came in and he heard his brothers grumbling, “I don’t know why Samuel wants to see you,” and you know there might have been a little “well, I’m not any worse than the rest of you,” he might have resented it a little bit. If there was talk afterwards and maybe the brothers were still scratching their heads a little bit, David wanted to say or maybe he did say, “Is it really that hard to believe that I would be the one? Can you really see it in all of the rest of you guys but not me?” David might have felt a little bit of that, but David was moving up in the world. Even as he fled Saul, as one convinced that God was working, David was moving up. David was going to be king. David was going to receive royal honor. David was going to experience what it was like to be those who were chosen in this world, those whom favor rest in this world.
Jesus goes the opposite direction as one upon whom all the favor of the universe should rest comes into the world to be rejected. The moment that David assumes that title, the trajectory is clear and pleasant, even if the road there is not. But Jesus knows what it’s like to be on a downward slope, and if you’re there tonight, you’re saying, “Well, I can’t relate to David because even though he went through some really hard things, David still knew he was going to be king. I don’t know if I’m going anywhere, and everything I thought I was going towards has passed me up.” What’s my purpose? What’s my reason to rejoice this season? Well, yes, we look to David’s wisdom that the Holy Spirit inspired this in Scripture, but we don’t follow David, we follow Jesus.
Jesus experienced what it’s like to be headed downward to depths that we will never go, thankfully, if we turn to him. We understand. We did it for us, verse 4: “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken, and smitten by God, and afflicted.” We look at Jesus, the humanity looks at Jesus and rejected him. How often do we still reject him by, if not our direct words, by our actions? We say, “Well, Jesus can’t really solve this. Jesus can’t speak into this.” How often do we do that even at Christmas? We sing the songs of what he did. He came to save the world and how holy the night was and so on and so forth. I say, “But I don’t know that I can really meet it when I sing that right now, because I’m not feeling joy. I’m not feeling hope in this moment,” or at least that hope feels like it’s weighted down by the world. But what did Jesus do? What did we see in Isaiah 53, verse 4, that he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows?
Whatever that is, when we sing of the one in the manger, we’re singing of the one in the manger who has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. And so much more. Kind of interesting if you’ve ever read about the difference between how a snowflake forms and hail. How many of you like snowflakes? At least if you don’t have to go anywhere. Yeah, snowflakes, they’re pretty, right? How many of you like hail? Anyone? Oh, Kathy likes hail, too. Well, it is kind of fascinating how it works. Don’t ever tell your insurance agent that. But it’s kind of interesting when you think about it.
Hail starts at the water drop. It starts with a water drop that is pulled up by upwinds in a storm, pulls it up higher where it freezes, and then it gets heavy and it drops back down. You may remember this from the distant murky past of having to study this in school, right? So it drops down and then the wind pulls it back up and it goes up and down and you get all the layers until it gets bigger and bigger and sort of like the hailstorm we had this summer while we were here, a little bigger. Yeah, thankfully not that big. But we had this big, I think, this summer. It was bad. It was ugly. And it’s not pleasant, right?
But it started seemingly with a good trajectory, a raindrop just dropping down. Now, here’s the interesting thing, I think, when you contrast hail, something that generally we don’t like, with something that we generally do like, which is snow. Because a beautiful snowflake, think about, you see a microscope zoomed in on a snowflake and just the beautiful patterns, the geometric shapes of it, always excited because of the way the water joins together. I mean, the miracle of God’s creation, right, that these beautiful, beautiful, intricate shapes that come in an infinite, different combination of patterns, starts not with a drop of water, but with dust or pollen.
I think that’s kind of interesting. They say that what happens is the particulates that are in our air, they get caught up in the winter storm and the water condenses around them. And that’s the starting point for your snowflake. And what strikes me on that, it looks like it has a downward trajectory. And if I asked you, imagine there’s hail and snowflakes and you’d never studied it before and you think about the one that does all kinds of destruction, one that generally speaking is really pretty and even in scripture is used as a picture of innocence and purity. And I said, well, one of them starts with pollen and dust and one starts with water. Ah, cleansing agent, right? Which one would we pick? Well, we pick the one without the pollution in it, right? Yeah, that’s the one that causes destruction.
And that strikes me because it didn’t start that way, right? If it had been a little different, it would have just dropped down, but it gets tossed up and then it comes down and it warms up. Oh, good, it’s warming, it’s melting, right? But no, it gets pulled up again and it’s creating this set of layers upon layers upon layers of ultimately destruction. On the other hand, the snowflake, as it gathers water and it freezes, it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere good. The pollen or the dust is still locked inside of it and yet it’s going to fall down and be something beautiful that God uses to speak of his forgiveness. That even in a land like Israel, that people didn’t see a whole lot of snow, the prophets could still speak of snow because it was such a vivid picture of what God does.
And it’s a thought about that and I anticipate the snow will get to see this winter. It made me think about how often it is as we approach Christmas. We see all the other people and it looks like there’s just pure water in their lives and we say, “Isn’t this great? I wish my life were like that.” And yet we don’t know what’s going to happen to that water. And on the other hand, we read about Jesus’ picture perfect in some sense life, right? Because he was perfect. He lived a perfect life and yet it’s not a picture perfect life in the sense that you could take any moment of it as a Kodak moment. No, it was awful, right? It looked like pollution. It looked like dust and dirt, things that make us sneeze. In fact, people looked at him and said, “We have nothing to do with him.” And yet as God took that dirt and he went and experienced the worst of life, he came in and started to form something that brings about innocence and purity.
And those times that we feel like if only I could live like the world says is good because I see it just looks like pure water, we don’t realize it’s going to turn to hail and destruction. God says, “Follow the one who came into the world to be counted as pollen and pollution,” because in that I’m going to take that and do something beautiful with it. It starts out ugly. And a lot of times we’re in that ugliness. We feel like we’re one giant piece of dust and dirt, but God himself came into the dirt.
It doesn’t mean that I can say if you’re here tonight and you pray and you light a candle and we sing a couple more songs that you’re going to go out and suddenly you’re going to be a beautiful snowflake tomorrow and everything’s going to be great. Here’s what I can say. If you trust in Jesus, you can know that that is what he’s going to do with your life. He’s going to take the impurity of your life and he’s going to take what he did coming into this world and place his innocence, those beautiful ice crystals upon it. And our sin in spite of ourselves will be set aside and replaced with something that testifies to God’s glory.
Christmas, God came into the world to take the pollen of sin, the dirt of sin, the garbage of sin, and make it a testimony to his righteousness and purity. In that moment we’re going to light a candle, a very common symbol of Christmas. Talk about the light coming into the world. We’re going to light a candle because as we testify to Jesus, as we testify to his light, we start to bring light to the world by God’s grace. Then I’m going to ask you to go over to the tree and grab one of the snowflakes over there. And if you’re online, if you don’t have a snowflake handy, maybe make one out of paper tonight or sometime in the next few days.
But in any case, have a snowflake and you can see those Christmas seasons. And think about that pollen and whatever grief and sorrows we’re carrying into the season, think about those there and know that the message of Christmas is a message of being under construction, of being restored, of going someplace, even if at the moment it doesn’t feel like it. That’s where the real rejoicing comes from. It’s not a big smile and a huge choir. The real rejoicing comes in knowing that God is going to bear our sorrows and carry our grief and bring restoration. That’s not true for some people. As Isaiah said, it was true for anyone who reads it who trusts in him.
Maybe you say, but it looks like a lot of Christians I know are going through hard times. It doesn’t look like anything that’s coming out of that pollen and that pollution. A lot of times when we feel that and we think, well, I can find on my own, we’re just becoming hail. Maybe we instead say, “Okay, God, I’m willing to come down. I’m willing to admit what’s actually true in my life, that there’s dirt and there’s pollen. If I know that you were willing to experience it for me,” and if you’ve never prayed that, if you’ve never said that, tonight would be a great night to do so. If you’re online and you’d like someone to pray with, you can just grab one of our online church family members, they’re right there in the chat and would love to pray with you.
Make this the night that you say, “Jesus, I need you to bear my sorrows and my grief because I can’t.” And know that it won’t magically fix everything right now. But God finishes what he starts. And you can count on the fact that he will make that new fallen snow out of our lives. A snow of righteousness and purity. A snow that someday is the warmth of fellowship with him. Would you pray with us? Father, we do come before you, each with our own sorrows and burdens. We pray that you’d heal our hearts. You direct us more towards you each and every day.
Lord, it hurts so often as we come into this season, as we just go through life. But would you give us a song of praise even when it hurts? Would you give us a song that isn’t based on the fact that we pretend everything’s okay but the fact that we know that you are making everything okay? The story of Christmas is about you doing just that. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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