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We can hear God’s Word, begin moving in the right direction, and still stop short when the journey lasts longer than expected. In Matthew 2, the wise men do not settle for reaching Jerusalem; they keep following God’s leading toward Bethlehem, raising a searching question for us: What will we do when obedience requires another step?
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Last week as we began this series exploring God’s bold mission for all of us who follow Him, we started by looking at the wise men and their study of God’s work. It all starts there. It all starts with knowing what it is that we need to be looking for, being willing to hear what God has to say. And we saw that not only do they need to study it, which is a key part of it, but then they also need to be willing to meet God in that study. That was the difference we saw with the wise men versus the scribes and the Pharisees who knew God’s word incredibly well but weren’t ready for action.
When we think about that, there’s a follow-up to that. We need to be willing to meet God in His word, to hear from Him as He speaks to us. But then He doesn’t just leave us there; He really does want us to go boldly forward beyond that. There’s more to the action that He’s calling us to, and that’s what we’re going to be thinking about this week.
There are all kinds of ways that we fail to take action. Like, I know for some of you, you’re thinking, “Tim, get the message, Christmas was weeks ago, why are you wearing a reindeer sweater?” Well, it really has to do with my inaction. I had meant to wear the sweater weeks ago. I always like to get them out, and I can’t help but smile a little bit with a sweater that has a giant red nose on it. I’d meant to wear it weeks ago, but I just never got around to it. And a lot of times, our lack of action is that kind of inaction. We simply don’t get around to it.
Sometimes we think we’re taking action when we’re really not. For example, I read about a man, Amar Bharati, over in India. He was struck back in the early ‘70s about how much war and unrest there was in the world, and he decided he was going to take action. And that’s a critical point: not only do we need to decide we want to take action—I decided weeks ago I wanted to wear the sweater—but then we need to do something about it. And he did.
What he decided to do was take his one hand and hold it up in the air and leave it there. In fact, it is still up in the air today. It’s still alive. For the last 50 or so years, he has held his arm up continually. It’s said that for the first couple of years, he was in excruciating pain in his shoulder from the weight of his arm being in the wrong position, but eventually his bones fused together, and now it’s just this appendage that sticks up. You can see at the beginning he had a strong muscular arm. Now it’s just this little stick held up in the air, totally useless. But he held up his hand for peace.
You might say, well, at least he was willing to do something. But it’s sort of an action that leads to inaction, isn’t it? And a lot of times, our actions lead to inaction as well. But God challenges us to actually go and do the things He’s called us to do—not just to care in theory about something, not just to have some sort of awareness, but to really come to Him and really go and do His work. And that’s what we see the wise men exemplifying.
As we think about this year and all the possibilities in it, I believe this is challenging us too. Where are we going to take action? As much as I want to say great job to Amar for having endurance, I can’t imagine doing this for years and years and years. A lot of times we’re doing our own things that bring pain we’re enduring, but they’re not actually drawing us to where God wants us either. Let’s pray as we go into God’s Word tonight that we wouldn’t just have endurance and a sense that we need to act, but that we would really go and do the things God’s called us to do. Let’s pray.
Father, would You help us? We want to do Your will, and yet so often we get caught up. Sometimes it’s like I’ve been with this sweater, I just didn’t put it on. We read Your Word and we just don’t put it on. We just don’t do it. But other times, we become aware of the places where we should be troubled, dissatisfied, and yet the action we take, even if it brings pain to us, even if it’s something where people can remark about our endurance, it doesn’t actually get us closer to where You want us to be. Would You help us to be like the wise men who take action, and take action that draws us closer to You? We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Well, let’s go ahead and turn back to Matthew chapter 2. We’re going to start at verse 8 tonight. Here’s what we read there.
So, we see a multi-pronged journey for the wise men. We saw the first part of that last week. They came to Jerusalem. They arrived sometime after Jesus is born, as we talked about last week again, and I’m sure you’ve heard before. But sometimes we kind of conflate it. This is not really the Christmas story—this is afterwards, maybe even a couple of years afterwards. But the key thing is, as they study God’s Word, they heard, they met God, and they arrived.
They show up at Jerusalem, the logical place to go if you think the King of the Jews has been born. Where do you go? You go to the capital. And so that’s what they do. They go and talk to the current king. Let’s find out what’s going on. We’ll talk to the people in the know.
When they arrive, we’re told that they find out where Jesus was really born: that the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem. So what do they do? They don’t say, “Well, we came all this way, we showed we cared, we showed up in Jerusalem. Let’s leave some gifts with Herod, and whenever he finds the King, he can give them.” No, they keep acting; they keep drawing closer to where the Lord’s leading them.
They start at the capital, but they don’t stop there. And I think that’s so important because so often we hear God’s call, we start to move toward God’s call, we get partway there. We’re carrying our gifts with us, we’re ready to celebrate, and then we’re not there when we thought we were going to be there. So we set down the gifts and say, “I’ll just leave a note.”
God’s challenging us to actually keep enduring, to keep moving. And not enduring like Amar, where we’re just standing still and hoping somehow that holding our hand up in the air will bring about peace, but actually moving. The wise men continue to travel. They don’t say, “We’ve traveled enough. We’ve already used up all our frequent flyer miles.” No, they keep moving.
And that’s the big thing that we see: they keep following God’s leading, and they follow God’s leading in His Word. And then when there’s a special sign—the star (not all of us get stars, most of the time we don’t)—but whatever the means, they keep following the Lord.
What are we going to do when we feel lost? When we feel like the journey is going on and on? Are we going to keep on going?
Now, some of you, as you come to Little Hills on weeks that we’re in person, you had to endure a bit to arrive there the first time. We’ve heard this story over and over again. Unfortunately, we’re blessed with a location. A lot of church plants don’t have a permanent spot to call home, but we do have one. What a blessing that is. But as much of a blessing as it is, it’s not necessarily the easiest to find.
Even if people kind of know approximately where it is, sometimes they make the wrong turn because it’s on the rear side of the building. I’ve heard stories about people driving in the alley behind the shopping center next to us, people who’ve driven up and down the front of the building looking for our location and not seeing it.
We keep trying to improve that. We have an electronic sign in the window now, we have lights in the window, but it’s not necessarily easy all the time to find. The question is, are you going to endure? Are you going to keep moving toward where God’s called you, or where Google or Apple Maps have called you, in the case of trying to find our building?
If you’re here, if you’ve been at Little Hills, then obviously you have endured in that sense. But the bigger question: are we enduring when the maps keep twisting and turning of life? Are we enduring where God is calling us? Are we willing to put up with the challenges, the setbacks, and the discomfort to keep moving to where faithfulness is in this moment? That’s what we see the wise men do. They come and keep coming.
Because they keep coming, they saw. Verse 10 says, “When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshipped him. Then opening their treasures, they offered him gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”
So they came. They came all the way to Bethlehem. They arrived, and then they got to see what it was they’d been looking for. They got to see the newborn king—or the not-quite-newborn-anymore-but-still-baby king. He wasn’t the 30-year-old Jesus doing ministry; this was still a young child Jesus. But they get to see because they endured, because they kept seeking after God’s will.
Notably, they’re anxious to see God’s will fulfilled. We’re told that when they see the star reappear and the star guides them to their destination, what do they do? They rejoice exceedingly.
A lot of times, even when God is in the process of guiding me, if it’s been a long haul, when I see the next step, I don’t necessarily rejoice. Isn’t it easy when we realize God is moving us to yet another step to think, “Okay, I guess at least I know where I’m going.” But they rejoiced exceedingly because they were excited for this. They were completely engaged even now.
Was this an easy journey? Well, compared to where they’d been, going from Jerusalem to Bethlehem wasn’t a big journey. But we’re not told the logistics of exactly how the star guided them to the house. Sometimes we picture, and maybe this is so, the star somehow moved in the sky in such a way that it was completely obvious which house it was over. When we think about bodies in the heavens, generally speaking, if it was anything like a normal star, it wouldn’t be completely obvious exactly what house to go into.
So many commentators think, and I think this is a good theory, that probably when they arrived in Bethlehem, maybe it guided them to a particular part of town, but they still needed to ask around where the baby was. Well, how would that work? People didn’t know about Jesus yet. But wait, they did.
We’re told in Gospel of Luke chapter 2 that the shepherds went and told people about what they had seen after they encountered the angels. So it would seem quite likely that these kings went and asked directions. They said, “Has anyone seen something spectacular?” And they found people who said, “Yeah, we have, and we know where you want to go.”
It’s quite possible that’s exactly what it looked like. Which means when they arrived in Bethlehem, it wasn’t just a nice, easy, straight shot. We came from Jerusalem, we arrived in Bethlehem, we know exactly what we’re doing. No, they continued to have to discern where God wanted them. But they did.
It speaks an awful lot to us because how often is it we arrive in the right town and we’re still thinking, “God, now what?” Are we willing to keep listening? Are we willing to keep rejoicing as God reveals bits and pieces of His plan?
It’s true the wise men—and actually if you think about the shepherds, because the shepherds, even as they encountered Jesus, they didn’t necessarily know how this was all going to work out either. But if indeed it was the case that perhaps those shepherds or the friends and acquaintances of the shepherds were the ones that told the wise men, what do we see? We see people who have incomplete pictures. They don’t know exactly how this is all coming together, but they’re so focused on wanting to hear from God, they’re so excited about what God is doing, they keep helping each other to put together pieces, just like we’re called to do as the church today. I might have a bit of the piece of the next part of the plan. You might have a piece. We help each other.
Are we willing to listen and then act? That’s what we see continuing to develop as we think about this story.
It makes me think of that news item from about a week ago—the Alaska Airlines flight that had its one door fly off and the cabin decompress, and people had their clothing ripped off. Phones were torn out of people’s hands as they were actually using them, etc. It’s miraculous they lived. But here’s the thing that’s so disturbing about it.
There’s a really happy ending, but it’s disturbing because it didn’t necessarily have a promised happy ending. The warning light kept going off in the plane that something was wrong, and they kept flying. They suspected something was wrong with the plane, and they cleared it as long as it stayed over land and not an ocean. For whatever reason, it was thought it’d be better if you crashed on land. They knew something was wrong, but they chose to keep going in the wrong direction anyway.
A lot of times, we’re not willing to listen. God turns on the warning lights. God is directing us, and we don’t act. Maybe it’s because we just assume it’s always there. Sometimes we get that way. I have a warning light in my car. I’ve been told by the mechanic not to worry about it, but a while back another warning light popped on and I didn’t even notice it at first because it was right next to the first one. It’s just like, “Oh yeah, it made it a little brighter over there.”
We get to that point sometimes—we’re just numb to what God’s doing, and we don’t hear it. It reminds us why we need to be in His Word regularly. We talked about getting into a Bible reading plan last week—let me encourage that again if you’re not in one right now. Then we need to be willing to hear God as He speaks to us, as we read His Word, as we pray. Are we waiting for Him to actually speak? Are we willing to hear from the body of Christ around us? Are we willing to then respond, even when we see that light, to say, “Oh, it’s not just brighter on the dash; I need to respond. It’s not just brighter in the cockpit. Maybe the plane should be grounded.” Are we willing to do that?
Sometimes it comes in the form of asking God to do something, and He does it. We see an answer to prayer, but we’re so focused on getting to the next step and the next step and the next step that as He answers that prayer, what do we do? We forget to stop and rejoice like the wise men did when they saw the next step in their journey happen. We forget to really listen to what God is saying and doing in answering those prayers. So we’re still missing the overall journey that He’s directing us on.
Because of that, there’s a crucial part of the action we’re called to do that we just overlook. Notice what they do when they arrive. Not everything they maybe had hoped for is immediately solved. If they understood something of what the Messiah was going to accomplish, we don’t know fully what they knew about the Messiah. They knew He was important and they should go see Him, but certainly not everything was done in that moment.
At the very least, we know there’d be another three decades before Jesus would go to the cross and take their sins to the cross with everyone else’s. If they genuinely believed in Him, if they trusted in Him, and they received that righteousness that anyone that trusts in Jesus can, they received it—but not yet. It’s not there yet.
A lot of times when we’re partway there and God has answered part of the prayer in our lives, we say, “Okay, I’m partway there, God. Now let’s focus on the next thing I need You to do.” Notice what they do as they arrive there. Even if things aren’t fully completed, and even as they’re going to learn that their journey to worship Jesus isn’t completed—they’re going to have to go back a different route to avoid Herod—notice the key thing I just said there. Realize that they were called to the action of worship.
Take a look at verse 11. It says, “And going into the house, they saw the child of Mary, His mother, and they fell down and worshipped Him.”
What do they do when they see Jesus? They don’t say, “Oh, let’s leave some paperwork here so that when Jesus gets older and he can read, he’ll realize that we came and saw Him and maybe he’ll give us favors. Maybe he’ll make a good deal with our country.” They didn’t do anything like that.
What did they do? They realized, and whatever level of understanding they may have had—we don’t have the specifics—but they realized in some sense they needed to show that Jesus deserved their complete, humble gratitude, their complete worship.
Now, some people have quibbled a bit on this word that’s translated worship most typically. It could also simply mean to kneel, but in that sense, we see elsewhere, for example, the New Testament used a slave bowing before a master, conveying a very distant social connection where they needed to show obedience to the other in that social custom. They could have been doing that. It’s not what you normally would do if you were a foreign important dignitary to even another king. They were symbolizing—they realized that compared to this baby they were very, very lowly at the very least.
The one thing we see quite often in the book of Matthew is that it’s not merely kneeling. It really is used in the context of worship, and it seems very, very plausible in this sense. Whatever the wise men understood, they understood in some sense that this wasn’t just a king. It wasn’t just someone who was vastly more important than they were. This was someone worthy of worship.
And they stop and they actually do it. They don’t say, “Well, he’s a baby, he won’t even know if we get down on our knees.” They didn’t say, “Oh, we’ve traveled so far, our knees are sore, there’s no cushions on the floor here, we’re not doing it.” They got down and they worshiped because they realized that that’s what they needed to do. That was the action they needed to take.
And so here it is. They come to this baby—these important men from an important place—and they come in this little rinky-dink land, in a rinky-dink town, to a little baby, and they show this level of humility, this level of understanding that compared to that baby, they were nothing. Because they wanted to actually do what they were called to do.
And is that what we do when we come before God? Do we come before Him and ask for stuff and more stuff and more stuff and forget to actually bow down before Him and say, “I don’t care what the most important person I could ever encounter is. God, You are so much more important. I need to just come and worship You. I need to actually show gratitude to You. I need to show in my life that I understand that I deserve nothing from You, and yet You give me more than I could ever imagine.” Do we do that?
That’s what we see in the action of the wise men. And I think that’s a challenge to us as we think about what kind of action we’re going to take this year. I mentioned resolutions and passing over the last couple of weeks. We’re all thinking about it this time of year.
How many people go and get that fitness club membership? How many people go and get the language learning membership I mentioned last week? How many people go and buy a bunch of books on organization or relaxation or whatever else—some kind of self-improvement? You get those books, you get the audio guide, you sign up for the program that’s going to send something to your smartphone to remind you to relax or whatever it might be.
All these different things that are going to make our lives better. But here’s the thing: if we just have the membership, it doesn’t do us any good. If we have the book sitting on our bookshelf, it doesn’t do any good. If we have the app and we never actually activate it, or it pops up notifications to tell us it’s time to learn the next few words in the language we’re studying or it’s time to take a few minutes to relax and read a piece of literature or whatever it might be, if we have those notifications coming in and we just swipe them off the phone and ignore them, it doesn’t do any good.
Likewise, even if we come here every week and we read God’s Word, if we’re not willing to act on it, it doesn’t do any good. God’s Word is always useful, always important, always good to be absorbing it. But the call is not just to absorb it; the call is to react to it.
When we don’t know how to react, well, the first step, the first reaction is the one we see with the wise men, and we don’t have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what it is—simply to come and to worship God. Say, “God, I don’t fully understand this plan yet. I don’t fully know where I’m going, but God, thank You for bringing me to this point.”
That’s what we see in these men—these men we know very little about but fittingly are given the title wise men because in this they show great wisdom. Let’s pray that this year we would show great wisdom in our action too by starting with worship and going boldly to do God’s mission as we do. Would you pray with me, please?
Father, would You help us that we would be people of both word and action, that we wouldn’t just be action for action’s sake? We wouldn’t just lift our arm up in the air and hold it or whatever else might come to us to do, but that we would be those of action that You’ve called us to. That starts with reading Your Word.
Would You help us to be in Your Word, to be in prayer, but then as we absorb Your truth, would You help us then to implement it, to go and do whatever part of it You’ve called each and every one of us to do, not by our own strength but by Yours? Help us to start by trusting in You, and if we haven’t yet, Lord, would You help us to make tonight the night we do?
But then would You continue to help us to trust day in and day out, to act day in and day out, and to bring a bit of Your kingdom to those around us, that Your kingdom would indeed come, that You’d use Your body to bring a taste of that to the people of earth. Amen.
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