In this special Christmas edition of Real Life Radio, Pastor Jack Hibbs takes us on a reflective journey into the heart of Christmas and the wonder it beholds. Through the powerful message of Jesus’s birth, we are called to explore the depths of God’s love, the mystery of godliness, and the grace that comes with the season of wonder. Pastor Jack challenges listeners to ponder the impact of Jesus’s life and ascension, inviting them into a life of reflection, wonder, and spiritual renewal.
We need him to go through our world and to cleanse our system of stupidity and fear and violence and hatred and all the stuff that’s going on that’s now native to the human heart. We need to be cleansed.
SPEAKER 01 :
This is Real Life. Welcome to Real Life Radio with Pastor Jack Hibbs. I’m David Jay, thanking you for joining us today as we listen, learn, and are challenged by God’s Word, the Bible.
SPEAKER 02 :
Hey everybody, something that you should know, that in our church and in our media community, in the social media community, we have for decades, as a church, started every year off with the reading of the one-year Bible all the way through. So I’m encouraging you to join us and do the same. If you are not one of the tens of thousands of people that are actually on the same page with me, with my wife, Lisa, with the church and beyond, the entire Real Life audience and beyond, get a copy of the One Year Bible and get started with us on January 1st. You can get a copy for yourself at jackhibbs.com, but by all means, please do this. And listen, get one for your friends or maybe a son or a daughter or a mom or a dad who The one-year Bible, through the Bible, in one year together. Join us.
SPEAKER 01 :
That’s the one-year Bible, and it’s available for a gift of any amount at jackhibbs.com slash real radio. That’s jackhibbs.com slash real radio. on today’s very special edition of Real Life Radio. Pastor Jack now brings to us his Christmas series with a message simply titled, Wonder, a celebration of Jesus, the Son of God, and the Christmas Messiah. You see, the wonder of Christmas is Jesus, God’s gift to all mankind who was seen by the angels and who preached among the people the wonder of his salvation, love, and sacrifice. So today, Pastor Jack teaches that we need time to reflect on where we are in life, to stop and look around in wonder, and stop those things that rob us of our time with the Lord. Now, with his special Christmas message called Wonder, here’s pastor and Bible teacher Jack Hibbs.
SPEAKER 02 :
So today, let’s stand today in honor of his word, but I’m going to read one verse. You don’t need to do anything today. No second verse for you. One verse as we end today our series titled Wonder that as we look at Christmas and As we continue in the spirit of celebrating the coming of Jesus, this is an incredible verse. It’s such a powerful verse, and it just wraps it all up. If there was a bow to put on this series over these last few weekends, this would be that bow. And it’s in 1 Timothy 3, verse 16. It’s a verse that I’ll read obviously. I might do a little… conversation on it as I read it, if you would allow me. But this is one of the most powerful scriptures regarding the deity, the mission of who Jesus Christ is. It’s one of those few verses that if you had to grab one verse, this would be one of those go-to verses. that proves so much about the heart of God toward you as we look to our series, Wonder. 1 Timothy 3.16, without controversy. The statement is without any debate, without any argument. The word actually means argue all you want. It’s not gonna do any good. It doesn’t change a thing. It’s an incredible statement. Those first few words are… equal to Isaiah 1, verse 18, where there God says, come, let us reason together, saith the Lord. And the word reason is, come, argue with me, says the Lord. Isn’t that a great statement? Why does he say that? Because he’s gonna win the argument. That’s the same truth here. without controversy, you can debate it until you’re blue in the face, it’s not gonna change anything, that great is the mystery of godliness. Great is the mystery of God having revealed to us what godly living looks like. In other words, whoever we’re gonna read about in a moment, if you’re reading it for the first time in your life, you’re gonna be reading about the prototype. Whoever he is, he’s the model of what God accepts. This is the picture. This is the standard. This is the bar. God was manifested. God was made known tangibly in a physical world to us in the flesh. That’s a huge statement, friends. God is announcing, I have revealed myself in skin. Now you think about who in all of the world and throughout all of history fits the bill. Justified in the spirit. That word justified means everything he did, whoever he is, he did it by the power of the Holy Spirit of God. In other words, he was dependent upon the Spirit of God for everything about his earthly visitation. Complete trust, complete reliance upon God the Spirit. Seen by angels, remarkable statement. Many of you have been bored stiff over the years because those three words I have gone to so many times because of what they mean. Whoever we’re talking about was seen by angels. You say, well, that’s odd. Don’t angels kind of like see everybody? Yeah, they do. Except this one. Whoever we’re talking about, an angel seeing him, this is different. The word seen here in Greek is seen. to gawk or to stare or to look at in such a shock that your eyes are wide open and your mouth is open. And I’ve submitted to you guys before and I say it again, I think it’s pretty hard to impress an angel. So whatever’s going on in this verse or the angels are very impressed. And some scholars say, and I love the romance of this, I wanna believe that this is true, that when you take that statement, seen by angels, theologically we know that it is connected with the manifestation of whoever we’re talking about in flesh. It’s a big deal, so big that it made angels’ eyes pop open and their mouths drop. So what’s incredible about it is many scholars believe that in the presence of God, we read in the Old Testament, the angels that do appear before God are described as with their wings, flying with two wings in his presence, with two of their other wings covering their bodies in his presence, And with the other two wings, they cover their faces. So what many believe, and I tend to believe it just because it’s cool, is that what this is talking about is that the Messiah, God, coming into the world, veiled in human flesh, at the birthing of Jesus, Jesus, as Mary’s in labor in the invisible angelic world, circled and gathered around her going through labor, imagine at some point the baby begins to crown. They call it in baby delivery. You know that moms, dads. She’s crowning or the baby’s crowning. What does that mean? You can see the beginning of his head and the hair. He’s coming out. And what is suggested is that the angels were gathered around. Big eyes and big mouth open. They’re gawking. They’re gawking at the manifestation of God coming in human flesh. Whoever we’re talking about was preached among the Gentile world. whoever it is we’re talking about, his message was picked up and carried to the world. Okay? Believed on in the world. Isn’t that amazing? Think of that missionary statement, believed on in the world. trusted in. Isn’t it amazing that in all of the religions of the world, you are called upon? In fact, that religious group looks to you to see if they can trust you to be a faithful follower in the group. Not us. We look to him and put our belief in him because he’s the one that’s faithful. It’s not the group. He’s the one that rescues us. It’s all based on him. Whoever we’re talking about, you’ve gotta be able to unpack this. Who is it in the world who the invitation is, believe on him and you shall be saved. There’s no other message in the world that is preached like this message. And if that’s not enough to get everything going, Jesus said to the disciples, it’s time for me to go back home. My job’s done here. Now it’s your job to take this news around the world. And the Bible tells us that as they were speaking with him, he ascended back up into heaven out of their sight. And it said that as they looked up into heaven, two angels appeared to them and said, why do you stand here? Look, I think that’s so angelically sarcastic. I think it’s fantastic. I think that’s a total normal thing. Oh my goodness, there he goes. Now what do we do? That these two angelic Representatives say, why are you standing here looking up into heaven? This same Jesus who you’ve seen vanish from your sight will come again in like manner. And they watched him. Everything right there fits. Of course, I’ve been a little sarcastic with you. It’s Jesus, if you haven’t caught on. It’s Jesus. Father, we come and we wrap up this last several weeks together as we’ve considered, Lord, the theme of wonder. And Lord, I think this is our 30th or 31st Christmas together as a home group or as a church family. And every year we’ve had a theme. And we’ve never had to sit around and say, I can’t think of a theme. Every year we’ve come up with a theme. And if we had to do that for the next thousand years, we would have a thousand different themes. Because you are the infinite awesome, eternal, living, holy, God almighty, And the evidence of your existence is everywhere. And Father, we pray that today for some maybe who’s viewing or some who are here in person, that this would be the day for them. That is a day of great transformation. That the wonder would strike them. So Lord, we give it to you. We pray in Jesus’ name and all God’s people said, amen. Church, you can be seated. And I do pray that that wonder would strike you. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Noah Webster in his 1828 dictionary, remember I told you if you weren’t here, I’ll say it again. There’s no dictionary worth owning. Yeah, I got my dictionary online. Dump it. Buy a real one. And I’m sure they have it online too where you can access it. But there’s only one dictionary for the English language and that is Noah Webster’s dictionary of the English language for America. 1828. If you buy the book, it’s about that thick. You can get it on Amazon. It’s about five and a half inches thick. And it is spectacular. Real English, real meaning. In fact, guess what? It’s so cool that the word tolerate, if I were to ask you to give a definition of what does the word tolerate mean, half of you would probably be wrong based upon your age. Because so many people today have defined the word tolerate is you’ve got to put up with what I want to impose upon you and you cannot have any other opinion that challenges my view. And that is the word intolerate. That’s to be intolerant. The modern day definition of to be tolerant is intolerant. The word tolerant means that both of you completely disagree on everything. But you recognize the value and the worth of one another as a human being, and you’re gonna love, honor, and respect each other, even though you’re completely at odds with each other’s worldview, or no matter what it might be in life. And of course, that comes from maturity, and we don’t see much of that anymore. But Noah Webster said that the word wonder means that it is the emotion which excites by novelty or by presentation, by sight or mind. It’s the observance of something that is new. You’re trying to figure out something unusual, brings wonder to you. That which is strange or great or extraordinary. He goes on. He mentions the word astonished, wonderment. In fact, in his dictionary, he uses Bible verses. And in Acts chapter three, verse 10, he says, this is the meaning of the word wonder found in the Greek language. And it says that they were all filled with wonder and amazement when the gospel was preached and the power of God came down. Those who were seeing what was going on, they were filled with wonder. And that’s the kind of God we serve. And It’s interesting to me that yesterday, we had a little bit of a Christmas morning sort of, but it was, we had the day together. That’s extremely rare for us. It was just her and I. And we did, it was just, are you kidding me? What are you gonna do? Watch, watch, I’m gonna put my feet up. No way! And it dawned on us that we actually, in our lives, we actually seek something that to us is more precious than gold, and that is boredom. We can’t find it. We would love to find some boredom. That would be amazing to look at one another and say, what are we doing? That would be a great day. Why do I say that? Because our lives are filled, your lives are filled with constant everything. And we had a time to reflect. And you know, last night when we put our head down on the pillow, we made the comment that today seemed to go by so slow. And it was so nice. And we wondered about that. But God reveals himself, God shows himself. And what’s amazing, for those of us who are younger in the audience, time seems to be flying. And then you gotta go back to school or you go to work and then time slows down. Have you noticed that? Have you noticed that when you’re doing something that’s really fun, time flies. And then when you gotta do the thing, whatever that is, it just drags on. But this is life. but there’s something about it to where you and I have the opportunity, no matter where we are in life. In fact, if this message were to land in a prison in North Korea, maybe somebody is somehow sneaking in a message transmitted that that truth translates No matter where you’re at in the world, the fact that Jesus Christ came and died on the cross for our sins and rose again from the dead demands that we as humans stop and look around and understand that we should all be in wonder. But we’re constantly robbed by the things that we allow to seep into our lives. So you guys, very, very quickly, we opened up in three different Sunday sermons. We saw that regarding the wonder, it began with the wonder of his word. And if you missed all this, you can go back and view it later. But we argued. in what is known as an apologetic manner, why you should believe in the Bible. And we assumed the position that you needed to be convinced. And so we showed you Bible prophecy, which is God’s statement of boldness to you, that he’s basically saying, you come and you prove my statements in the Bible wrong. You test, you try, test me. Look, examine my word and find a fault. If you can find a fault, then you don’t have to believe in me. The accuracy of God’s word, which brought us to the wonder of his power. That God in his power. would come to this world, not only in creation by making it, but of course, the fact that he manifested himself as we read a moment ago in human flesh. And I love that because Jesus went into places and disrupted. He disrupted things like disease and sickness and death. Every funeral Jesus went to, he ruined it. By raising the dead. Lepers who were condemned came running to him and he cleansed them of their leprosy. It’s interesting. He never healed anybody of leprosy. Did you know that? The Bible says he healed people of blindness. He healed people of diseases. He healed people of demonic possession. There’s only one thing. He did not. Interesting statement. He never healed anybody of leprosy. It says he cleansed them. from leprosy, which is a very interesting statement. He cleansed them. It’s like he wiped through them some stringent that purified their immune system and their blood. We need that today, by the way. We need him to go through our world and to cleanse our system of stupidity and fear and violence and hatred and all the stuff that’s going on that’s now native to the human heart. We need to be cleansed of our soul’s leprosy in the world. And we saw his grace. How does he do that? He does that by the wonder of his grace. Remember church, it means that God does to you what you can never earn. That he singles you out as though he were to walk through this congregation this morning and just tap on your head. And if he were to tap on your head, everything that he knows that would bless and fulfill your entire life. Think about what do you want in life? That which is from him he would do. By the way, what you and I want in life may be very at odds with what he wants for us in life. And there is the danger of living life. If I live my life for what I want, I wind up getting hurt and hurting others. If I wind up finding out what it is he wants me to live my life for, I wind up having an awesome life that turns out to bless other people. My goodness, I can admit this because it’s such a great film. We saw last night the movie about Kurt Warner’s life. The… The Ram, what’s it called? It’s called the American underdog. And about his faith in Christ, I was impressed. And still to this day, I didn’t know this, but still to this day, his life is considered the greatest athletic comeback or underdog achievement known in professional sports. And at the end of it all, he gives God the glory. He gives Jesus Christ the glory. When you yield your life to what God wants to do, that’s his grace. And then we saw that his grace brings to us salvation. You and I need to be saved from our sins. You have dirty thoughts and God sees them. Arrogant thoughts, pride, hate, violence, evil, envy. Remember we went down the list of the 10 commandments, went through those and we all decided we need his salvation. And then we saw the wonder of his love, his love. which led to the wonder of his sacrifice. And that’s how we ended last week, sacrifice. So now we pick it up in our closing message, and that is the wonder of surrender. Can you mark that down? The wonder of surrender. You say, what do you mean the wonder of surrender? The Bible tells us that Jesus Christ, when he came into this world physically, you gotta remember now, he’s 100% God. He never ceased from being God. But God, the Son, came into this world and he relegated himself to the birthing of being a human into this world so that he would feel temperature like you feel temperature. And you might say, well, him being God, doesn’t he know everything? Yes, but listen, he became flesh so he could tell you, I know what it feels like. He knows all things, but you and I know nothing. So when we have a question, we can go and ask him and he can say to us, I know exactly what that’s like.
SPEAKER 01 :
Pastor and Bible teacher, Jack Hibbs, here on Real Life Radio with his special Christmas message called Wonder. Thanks for listening today and a Merry Christmas from Pastor Jack and all of us here at Real Life Radio. You know, our prayer for you is that your Christmas will be full of contentment and joy that can only come from knowing Jesus Christ as your personal Savior. And quite frankly, it’s given us great joy to share our Real Life Radio program with you over the past year. Thanks for welcoming us into your home and into your life. And we’ll continue on the next edition of Real Life Radio.
SPEAKER 02 :
Hey, Pastor Jack Hibbs here, and I want to wish you a Merry Christmas, and I also want to challenge you. Join me, will you, to share the love of God with everybody we meet at this time of the year. Now listen, the whole world is decorated in colors and in lights, and people are saying Merry Christmas. Let’s take advantage of the reality. Let’s take advantage of the truth. It’s the recognition of the birth that God has sent His Son into the world. So we should tell people, hey friends, hey family, this is about Jesus, the Lord’s Savior, mankind’s redemption. Remind them that the baby that was born in Bethlehem is the man who died on the cross for our sins. So please, Merry Christmas to you, but let’s not keep it to ourselves. Let’s tell the world.
SPEAKER 01 :
From Pastor Jack and all of us here at Real Life, we want to wish you and your family a Christmas season filled with the peace, love, and joy of Jesus Christ. God bless you and yours today and in this new year to come. Merry Christmas. This program is made possible by the generous contributions of you, our listeners. Visit us at jackhibbs.com. That’s jackhibbs.com. Until next time, Pastor Jack Hibbs and all of us here at Real Life Radio wish for you solid and steady growth in Christ and in His Word. We’ll see you next time here on Real Life Radio.
