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Bible preaching from the pulpit of Choice Hills Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina
Let's go to Matthew chapter two this morning.
Matthew chapter two.
Matthew chapter two.
Wanna begin reading in verse number one
and read down to verse number eleven.
Bible says,
And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together,
he demanded of them where Christ should be born.
And they said unto him, In Bethlehem of Judea, for thus it is written by the prophet,
and thou, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, art not the least among the princes of Judah,
for out of thee shall come a governor that shall rule my people Israel.
Then Herod, when he had privily called the wise men,
inquired of them diligently what time the star appeared.
And he sent them to Bethlehem and said, Go and search diligently for the young child,
and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.
When they had heard the king, they departed, and lo, the star which they saw in the east went
before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.
When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.
And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother,
and fell down and worshiped him.
And when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts, gold,
and frankincense, and myrrh.
Let's pray.
Our fathers, we come to this passage of Scripture.
We are cognizant of this being the advent of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Lord, help us to take away from this passage truths from these men who have come to visit
the Lord Jesus in His birth.
Lord, we pray that You guide our study and bless Your Word to our hearts, to our lives,
especially as we try to apply it, as we try to examine our own hearts and our own lives,
and respond to You in the same way that these wise men responded to the Lord Jesus
and the news of His birth.
So guide us, Lord.
I acknowledge I don't have any power or ability except as You give to guide me and help me to say
the things that Your people need.
And Lord, You are the one who searches the hearts and the reins, and You know, Lord,
what it is that we need.
Work in us, teach us, and help us this morning.
We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.
These wise men, of course, Jesus had already been born
for some time at this point.
We don't know exactly how long after the birth of Christ, just as some background.
Of course, everyone in here basically knows that.
The little manger scene we have down here is not scripturally accurate except in the characters.
But who the characters are and where they are is not exactly accurate according to the scripture.
But we do know that the wise men visited Jesus and Mary and Joseph sometime after he was born,
but not yet when he was not yet two years old.
And that's based upon the verse 7, which says,
"'When Herod, when he had privily called the wise men, inquired of them diligently what time the star appeared.'"
So we have to make an assumption.
The assumption is that the star appeared at the time of Jesus' birth.
The Bible doesn't say that, but we assume that.
So that leads us to this idea that in verse number 8 and on down through there that Herod commanded
all the children two years old and under to be killed based upon that timing.
So it could have easily been that they were there, that Jesus had been born for almost two years or
under a year or six months.
There's no way to know for certain.
Herod, of course, wanted to make sure that he took care of the business.
So he probably padded it a little bit, I'm guessing here.
So that would put Jesus being born somewhere in the realm of 4 to 6 BC, if that makes sense.
Because we know for certain as a historical record when this Herod, Herod the Great, when he died.
That is recorded in history.
And we know that Jesus had been born already by that time,
and he was not yet two years old because Herod's still alive.
Right? So we know that.
We know that much.
So it might be surprising to you to find out that the turn from BC to AD was not actually
when Jesus was actually born, but that makes it irrelevant to us here today.
So the wise men come.
Notice there's in verse number 1, they come to Jerusalem.
And what's interesting is they have to be told where Jesus is actually likely located.
They have come from the east, but they've come to Jerusalem.
In other words, they come to the capital looking for Jesus because what they have seen at this point,
at this point the wise men know there's a star that has newly appeared.
And in case you didn't know, stars don't newly appear.
The stars that we look at tonight are the same stars that Herod and the wise men saw.
They look the same.
They haven't moved.
So the fact that there is a new star that has appeared is an out of this world,
no pun intended, out of this world event.
That is a celestial mark of this grand event of the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Again, this is not something that happens in history.
And so verse number 2, they come to Jerusalem and they say,
where is he that is born king of the Jews?
For we have seen his star in the east and are come to worship him.
So they know that this star marks an important moment in history.
And I think, my personal opinion and many others think it as well, that Jesus was,
they are looking at the scriptures that they have access to in the east.
Because that's how they know that the king of the Jews has been born.
So they see the star and they know from the scripture the timing of the birth of the king
of the Jews.
Now that's written in the book of Daniel, very plainly.
And so they put the two together and they conclude that this star, again,
something that never happens being astronomers, which we'll see in a minute,
they conclude that this coincides with the birth of Christ.
And so they come to the capital and they're seeking the Lord Jesus Christ
and in order to worship him.
But they don't know exactly where he would be born.
So there's some information they don't have access to, which is specifically where the
prophet Micah said that Jesus would be born.
About 600 years, or 500 years rather, before Jesus would be born.
The prophet Micah said that he would be born in Bethlehem, which is what is quoted in verse
number six.
Now we don't know how many wise men there were.
We assume there were three because there were three gifts.
But as it turns out, in what I would like to say to you today, I also have three points.
I don't know if that's related or if that means there were three.
But there's three primary things I want to show you and it's coming primarily from verse
number 11.
Let's read verse number 11 one more time.
When they were coming to the house, they saw the young child with Mary's mother and fell
down and worshiped him.
And when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts.
Two things I want you to see from this verse.
First of all, they worshiped him.
Now for each one of these things quickly that I want to get through, that's the theme.
The theme is that the Lord Jesus Christ is worthy.
Again, the Lord Jesus Christ is worthy.
It doesn't matter what we're talking about.
Doesn't matter if we're talking about life, we're talking about treasure, we're talking
about time.
He is worthy of everything.
For unto him and from him and to him and for him are all things.
That's what Colossians tells us.
He is worthy of everything.
And that's really the theme.
That's really what the wise men are showing in bodily form, in history.
They are demonstrating in their lives in the same way that you and I also can demonstrate
that Christ is worthy.
He is worthy.
Fill in the blank.
He's worthy.
He deserves that.
He deserves that.
The other thing I want you to see from verse 11 that we're going to look at is the gifts.
You know, of course, we know Christmas time is a time of gifts.
You no doubt have bought gifts.
I sure hope you have.
If not, you're going to have a busy next couple of days.
Or your wife will, as the case may be.
And so we think of gift giving and the Christmas time and the gift giving.
That's really an American tradition.
And it's something I enjoy doing.
Showing love and kindness to family and friends and those kinds of things.
But we think of gift giving and automatically we think of what we're going to get.
Now as you get older and you have everything and if you want something you just go buy it,
generally speaking.
The things that you really want that you can't just go out and buy.
Nobody's going to give to you anyway.
That's just a fact.
As the toys and the expenses get bigger.
But as you get older, you have everything.
You know, and every year, I'm sure this is true of Sister Karen, it's true of the men for sure.
As you get older, you realize that every year people are asking,
what do you want for Christmas?
And you never have an answer.
You never have an answer.
I don't ever have an answer.
Unless I just happened by coincidence to have been looking at something or something like that.
But especially as kids, kids are always thinking about not what they're going to give,
but what they're going to get.
And that's really what Christmas is about.
I mean, I know it's supposed to be about the birth of Christ,
but in practical terms in society at large, it's about gift giving.
And so we think about gift giving and in this verse,
we see not the wise men getting gifts,
but we see the wise men giving gifts to the Lord Jesus.
Now, what has happened is over time, this has been flipped around
because we have been conditioned to think that God exists to give us things.
That God exists to give us gifts.
Now, I'll say this to start.
We know that God does give us gifts.
Every good and every perfect gift cometh down from above from the Father of lights.
We know that.
We know that God does give us gift,
but sometimes we presume upon those gifts and we think that because God gives us gifts,
things we have not earned, that somehow He is overflowing with gifts.
He's obliged or required to do those things and He's not.
He's not.
He gives those gifts freely to us.
Gifts of His grace, gifts of His Son, the gift of eternal life.
And we can go on and on.
Even the things that sustain our physical life come from God.
He gives us those gifts, but sometimes we twist that in our fallen nature.
We twist that to presume upon God's gifts to us.
We start to think that God is there to respond to our snap.
What do we need?
We just say, and that's not the way it is at all.
You do not see that with the wise men.
What do you see with the wise men?
You see them bringing gifts to the Lord Jesus.
So yes, Christmas time definitely is related to gift giving,
but really if you want to be strict about it and biblical about it,
the gift giving we should be thinking about first and foremost,
especially if we are going to hold to this season being about the birth of Christ,
it should be about the gifts we give to Him.
Because that's what's found in the text of Scripture.
These men gave the Lord Jesus Christ gifts,
and we also have gifts to give to Him.
We do.
Now the truth is we can call them gifts, but I don't know that they're actually gifts.
For all things that we have come from Him to begin with, and we owe Him all.
We owe the Lord Jesus Christ everything, life and breath and salvation and eternal life,
and every good and every pleasant thing that we have, we owe it to Him.
So in strictly speaking, it's not really a gift.
But these wise men did bring the Lord Jesus Christ gifts.
They brought Him three gifts, not the three you're thinking of.
I count those just as one.
They brought Him three gifts. I want to share those with you.
Look at verse number one.
The first gift that you see the wise men giving our Lord is their journey.
Their journey.
This journey of the wise men was a months long journey one way.
This was not like our journey.
We drove eight or nine hours for our anniversary, and we drove eight or nine hours back,
and it was super easy and uneventful and inexpensive comparatively.
It was an easy journey, but this is not the case with these wise men.
We don't know exactly where these wise men came from.
It just says the east.
Most likely, given their name, given the word that is used of these wise men,
which is where you get the, you've heard the term magi or magi.
That's the term used.
Sometimes people refer to the wise men in that way.
This was a specific term related to the Medes and the Persians.
Okay?
So you think book of Daniel.
Okay?
And what we do read is in Ezra, there is an example of, we have an idea of how long this
journey would have taken because in Ezra, the Bible says this.
Now, you know, Ezra led some of the children of Israel, the remnant, back out of Babylon
into the land of Judea.
So they walked or rode animals from there into Judea, which was roughly the area that
these wise men likely were.
Ezra 7, 9 says this, for upon the first day of the first month began he to go up from
Babylon and on the first day of the fifth month came he to Jerusalem according to the
good hand of God upon him.
So you say first day of the first month for us, it's January 1st.
It's not in the Bible, but January 1st.
And so they travel from Babylon, which if you look at the Fertile Crescent, it looks
like this.
Travel from Babylon, you go up here and you follow the rivers and the caravan routes,
and then you come down through Syria down into Israel.
It took them four months, first day of the first month to the first day of the fifth
month.
That's four full months to travel.
Now, this is a large entourage.
We think of the wise men traveling, just three of them.
It is certain as far as you can be certain without the Bible actually saying it that
they were not by themselves.
There were probably many of them and had a whole entourage of servants, for you don't
carry the expensive gifts that they were carrying with no security and with all of
those things.
So it was probably a substantial group of people.
Probably took them at least three months.
One way.
One way.
They had to eat along the way for six months.
That didn't include all the time they spent in Jerusalem, however long that was, and in
Bethlehem.
This was a substantial journey.
This is not the only journey found in scripture.
There are many, many journeys in scripture.
Here are some of the big ones.
And each one of these journeys is related to a spiritual journey that these people of
God partook when they journeyed for the Lord.
You think of Abraham when he left Ur of the Chaldees.
In fact, very similar to these wise men because of the area of the world where Abraham lived
in Ur.
Abraham journeyed that same journey into Canaan.
Israel journeyed from Egypt all the way into Canaan.
Ezra and Nehemiah, as I already mentioned, they traveled from Persia and Babylon into
the land of Israel.
Paul the apostle was known as one who took at least three, maybe four missionary journeys.
Journeys for God.
The time and the expense in a journey is enormous.
Enormous.
Enormous.
Not to mention the gifts they gave.
Here's what I want you to see.
This journey was a gift to the Lord Jesus Christ because nobody commanded these wise
men to make this journey like was the case with Abraham or Israel.
Nobody commanded them.
Even you could argue Ezra and Nehemiah or even the apostle Paul.
The Lord directed them specifically to take those journeys to those various places where
they went.
But you don't find this in this passage.
These men, apparently looking at the scripture that they had access to in coordination with
this star that appeared, have made a voluntary decision of their own accord to make this
enormously time consuming and expensive journey to go visit this king of the Jews that has
been born.
They didn't have to.
They wanted to.
They didn't have to give of their time and their wealth.
I think probably one of the things that's underestimated a lot about this journey is
how expensive it would have been.
In modern terms, imagine going anywhere for three months.
Imagine going anywhere for six months.
I mean, there's probably a lot of us in this room that don't have enough money in our savings
account to pay for it.
Am I right?
That's definitely probably the case.
If we had to go on a six month journey, and yet they did, without being prompted, without
being commanded, for the one and only purpose to worship the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Lord Jesus Christ.
That's it.
They gave him some gifts, but that wasn't their stated reason.
Their stated reason is what?
He said, verse number two, where is he that is born king of the Jews?
For we have seen his star in the east and are come to worship him.
Here's what I want you to see from this.
The Lord Jesus Christ, in their estimation, in their sight, was well worth the time and
expense of this journey.
He was worth it to them.
They had the Lord Jesus Christ and his birth, his advent, in such a high estimation that
they were willing to expend the time of their life, they were willing to take the risks
of a journey like this in a very unfamiliar and unfriendly area where there's thieves
and there's danger and there's risk, and they're willing to expend the money on themselves
and the gifts and the servants and all of that went along with the journey like this.
They were willing to do all of that just so that they could worship the Lord Jesus Christ.
It provided absolutely no benefit to them whatsoever.
They were, in fact, that's what we have backward, right?
We think of Christmas as the time of receiving, but actually everything in scripture is giving.
God gave, the wise men gave, the shepherds give.
You see over and over and over this idea of giving, not giving in general terms, but giving to God.
When I think of their journey, I just want to ask you this.
What is it that you are willing to give to the Lord Jesus when it comes to your time?
When it comes, and I'm not talking about, listen, I'm not talking about doing the flowers,
I'm not talking about that's all important, but I'm not talking about petty things.
I want to be a little bit higher than this.
I'm talking about your life.
The years that you've been living in the past, the years that you've been living in the past,
your life, the years, the days, the months of your life.
Is the Lord Jesus worthy of that?
Is he worthy of your life?
Is he worthy of your eternity?
Is he worthy of you giving your whole self to him?
Is he worthy of that or not?
These men gave that entire block of time that they had for this journey,
they gave it to the Lord Jesus Christ and to nothing else but to him.
You, you and I, we are going to expend our life on something.
Let it be on the Lord Jesus.
Those Netflix shows can wait.
It's not going to make any difference if you binge watch Netflix.
It's not going to make any difference in your life if you give yourself to the,
to the expenditures of time at the expense of worshiping the Lord Jesus
and giving your life and your whole, the years of your life to him.
He is worthy.
He deserves it.
The second thing that they gave to him.
Look at verse two.
Saying, where is he that is born king of the Jews?
For we have seen his star in the east and are come to worship him.
Verse 11.
And when they were coming to the house,
that's how we know that they weren't in the stable anymore.
They were in the house.
They saw the young child with Mary's mother and fell down and worshiped him.
The second thing that you see here is they gave the Lord Jesus as a gift,
their worship, their worship.
Take a peek if you would at Daniel, the book of Daniel.
We'll come back to Matthew in just a minute, but let's look at Daniel briefly.
I want to give you some more background about these,
these magi, these wise men.
Daniel chapter one.
Daniel chapter one.
Verse 20.
I want to bounce around the book of Daniel a little bit and show you kind of
what these wise men were like.
Verse 20.
Now I want you to put your eyes on that verse again, if you would.
Verse 20.
And look at the word magician.
What are the first four letters of that word?
Yeah.
There's a relationship between the word magi and magician.
Okay.
Now I know we think of magician, well, we think of magician as someone who practices
sleight of hand, but in this time a magician was someone who practices the occult,
someone who practices witchcraft, sorcery, and those kinds of things.
And that included at this time, that included the magicians and astrologers
were not always a good group of people in scripture.
Let's look at Daniel chapter two, just the column, the next column there.
Verse two says this.
And the king commanded to call the magicians and the astrologers and the sorcerers
and the Chaldeans for to show the king his dreams.
So they came and stood before the king.
So he, the king would have relied on the magicians and the wise men.
We'll see this later.
He would have relied on them to interpret dreams.
But notice it's groups, magicians, astrologers, and sorcerers.
Again, those aren't all good types of things.
Would you agree?
Right.
All right.
Look at chapter two, verse 27.
The Bible says this.
Daniel answered in the presence of the king and said,
the secret which the king hath demanded cannot the wise men.
You see that?
There's a new word there.
The astrologers, those people who look at the stars, right?
And predict the future based upon the stars.
The magicians, the soothsayers, fortune tellers, show unto the king.
So you're seeing this, you see how this group of people,
or you might say class of people, is popping up again and again and again and again.
And they're all grouped together, right?
They're all grouped together.
Whether they're worshiping the devil or looking at tarot cards or crystal balls
or the stars or incantations or whatever they're doing,
communicating with the dead, whatever they're doing,
they're all lumped together.
And the king is calling upon them when he needs advice.
So what I want you to start to see is that this group of wise men,
which is what they're called in 227,
is a group that is very high up in the government, if you will, of the king of Babylon.
Look at chapter four of Daniel.
Verse seven.
Then came in the magicians, the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers.
And I told them, told the dream before them,
but they did not make known unto me the interpretation thereof.
But at the last, Daniel came in before me, whose name was Belteshazzar,
according to the name of my God, and in whose spirit,
in whom is the spirit of the holy gods.
And before him I told the dream, saying,
O Belteshazzar, master of the magicians, breaks.
Daniel is part of this group.
You see it?
Not just a part, he's the boss of this group.
Master of the magicians.
Look at chapter five.
Verse seven.
And the king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans,
the soothsayers, and the king spake and said to the wise men of Babylon,
Whosoever shall read this writing and show me the interpretation thereof shall be clothed with
scarlet and have a chain of gold about his neck and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.
Then came in all the wise men but could not read the writing,
and nor make known to the king the interpretation thereof.
Look at verse 11.
This is the queen now speaking to the king.
There is a man in thy kingdom in whom is the spirit of the holy gods,
and in the days of thy father, light and understanding and wisdom,
like the wisdom of the gods, was found in him.
Whom the king Nebuchadnezzar, thy father, the king I say thy father,
made master of the magicians, astrologers, Chaldeans, and soothsayers.
So Daniel was part of this group.
Does that not shed some light on these wise men?
So here's what I want you to see from this.
These wise men were no doubt part of a group that advised the king.
And there was some shady characters in that without a doubt.
But there were also men who feared God like Daniel,
like Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego.
There were also men who feared God.
No doubt these wise men were of that sort.
And they looked at the stars and they studied the scripture,
and they had wisdom given to them by God, and they gave advice to the king.
Now go back to Matthew chapter 2.
This is a special and highly honored class in media in Persia.
This is a class of men that were associated with the king himself.
And yet they come in, in verse 11, and they fall down and worship a baby,
an infant, a young child as the case may be.
You see, they stand last, they stand rather first in a long line of people
that the Bible says worshiped Jesus Christ.
There's at least 10 times recorded in the gospel in which people fell down
and the Bible says worship the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now that's a strong indicator of who this person is.
He is not just a king.
Although he's called a king, he is a king.
He's not just a king.
He's not just a man.
He's not just a ruler.
He is God in the flesh.
And that's the only reason that he is worthy of worship.
And yet we see these men falling down and worshiping the Lord Jesus Christ.
So even though this was a child, these men, these wise men of this class of people that
were close to the king, viewed him much higher than they viewed himself.
They viewed him much higher than they viewed their own king.
Here they have traveled to fall down and worship him.
Now the idea behind worship and the kind of the root of the word is this idea of prostration.
This idea of prostration.
I don't know if you've ever had a time in your life where you have been so moved by
God, so blessed.
The Lord has just done something so amazing, so miraculous and indescribable in your life
that all that you could do was fall down in prostration and worship him.
If that has never happened in your life, I hope it does at some time.
Where you, that's the, that's the, the inherent response to what God has done.
But that's what this word is talking about.
It's talking about the physical body falling down on the knees and down to the ground face first.
Now here's what I want you to see.
That's what these men did.
They fell down face first before this, this child.
But it is not just the physical position of the body that is important in this.
I mean anybody can bow down their body at any time, but it's actually the prostration
of the person and the person's heart that is symbolized.
It is this kind of honor, this kind of reverence that we give to God and to God alone.
It is the true and inward prostration of the soul before the Lord that is indicated by
the prostration of the body.
We can go through the motions so we can say bow down like it's done in Islam five times
a day, bow down, bow down, bow down, bow down, bow down, bow down, bow down, bow down, bow
down five times a day.
One of the five pillars of Islam is to pray the prayers and bow on the mat five times
on the carpet five times a day.
That you know that prostrate that physical prostration.
I want to tell you something going through the motions without a heart that is prostrate
before God is useless.
You see the Lord wants our soul, our inner man to also be prostrate before him to worship him.
But the problem is in our world, in the religious world in particular, we have degraded this
idea of worship.
We think worship is what we do when we come to church.
We call it a worship service which is foreign to the scripture, not in there.
It really isn't.
I'm sorry to disappoint.
The only thing this is called where we meet together is a meeting.
It's where the church meets.
But really the worship is for you and for me to do.
Not just when we come to church.
Worship, worship all you want when you come to church.
You should do that.
That's a good thing.
But you should, you and I should be worshiping God all the time.
Worship is not a position of the body only.
Worship is not a church service or a right that we perform.
Worship is a life that we have lived prostrate before God.
You see when we worship, think about these men.
Imagine you take the person of greatest power that you can think of.
Think of Governor McMaster, right?
Who has the, he has the top office in our state.
Think of the president, President Trump or any, a king in the area of the kingdom.
What would you think if you saw that guy?
Worshipping something.
That guy, worshiping God.
What would you think?
You would think that is high as of a position that that person holds.
Yet he esteems the object of his worship far higher.
Would the God of God worship that person?
Would the God of God worship that person?
Would the God of God worship that person?
That's far higher.
Would the God our president would worship the Lord Jesus Christ?
Would the God our governor would worship the Lord Jesus Christ?
But when someone of power, which is what these wise men are, these advisors to the king.
When we see them bowing down and worshiping, giving this gift of worship to Christ, you know what they're doing?
They're taking all the honor that they have.
And they're diverting it to the object of their worship, the Lord Jesus Christ.
All the honor that they have in their position.
And they're giving it to him.
That's what this, this indicates.
When we worship the Lord Jesus Christ, and I'm not talking about when we attend a church service.
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm not talking about when we perform a right, even if that thing is good and a good thing to do.
But when we worship and our heart and life is prostrate before the Lord Jesus Christ,
we are taking our honor, whatever esteem that we might have, that others might know or see in us.
And we're giving it to him.
And we're giving it to him.
Brothers and sisters, let me ask you a question, several questions.
What does it say to others of the Lord Jesus Christ when you are here on Sunday, faithfully?
I was talking to Steve right before the service.
You had no idea.
I was, I was, I was going to, when you, when you said what you said about what your neighbor said,
immediately thought about this right here.
What, what, what does it say?
And I know people have a lot of different ideas about why people go to church.
I get that.
But what does it say about the Lord Jesus Christ when your neighbors and your friends and your
family see and hear and know that you are faithful to worship him?
You're faithful to gather with the saints, to hear his word faithfully, regularly.
You know what it says?
It says Jesus is worthy of this time.
What does it say when, when we as a group, we as a church go out to downtown Greenville
and we go pass out gospel tracts that tell about Jesus and people might mock us and people might
say bad things about us.
And sometimes they do.
But what is it, what does it say?
You see, it's not about us at all.
It's diverting.
It's that act of worship, diverting that to Christ.
We're saying Jesus is worthy of this.
He's worthy of my time.
He's worthy of the scorn.
He's worthy of the shame.
He's worthy of us looking like the freaks on the street corner.
What does it say of others?
What does it say to others of Christ when we serve him and sacrifice for him?
Others might mock us.
Others might think we go overboard.
Others might think we're off our rocker or they might think we've, you know, we're fanatics
or we're crazy or whatever the case might be.
But the one thing that they cannot deny when we live a life characterized by worship to
the Lord Jesus Christ, they cannot deny that we esteem the Lord Jesus Christ worthy of
that worship.
And I want to tell you something.
He is worthy of it.
He's worthy of you and me standing on the corner passing out tracts.
He's worthy of you and me being faithful to church and being faithful to serve others
and being faithful to bless others in his name.
He's worthy of every, any, and all things.
He's worthy.
He deserves it.
The last thing.
The last gift that they gave to him is in verse 11.
And when they were coming to the house, they saw the young child with Mary's mother and
fell down and worshiped him.
And when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts, gold and frankincense
and myrrh.
Gold is associated with two things in the Bible.
God and a king.
There's no substance in scripture of greater value than gold.
Gold's found in heaven.
It's the most valuable possession of the rich.
False gods were made of gold.
The tabernacle and the temple of God were adorned with gold.
The instruments were all made of gold.
Then you have frankincense.
Frankincense was a part of the blend of spices that was used by the priests that was burned
in the temple when they burned incense.
And you've got to remember that at this time, these kinds of perfumes and materials were
very, very expensive.
Very expensive.
And myrrh, similar to frankincense, was a sap, what they call it, resin.
A resin of a tree.
Very, very expensive.
Myrrh was a gift that was given by Jacob to Joseph.
You remember when they were still in Canaan and they had to bring a present to Joseph when
he was over Egypt in order to buy food there in the famine.
It was myrrh was a part of that.
It was a valuable gift.
Myrrh was a part of the anointing oil that was used to anoint Aaron the priest.
Myrrh is associated with the death of Christ in Scripture.
The soldiers tried to give Jesus vinegar mixed with myrrh.
The women who believed in Christ came to anoint the body of Jesus with spices,
which included myrrh after he was buried.
So all three of these items, and by the way, if you've never had myrrh, we did this last year.
I have some myrrh right here.
If you want to know what it smells like, you're welcome to come.
I'll put it down here on the communion table and you can come
give it a sniff so that you know what we're talking about here.
I'm going to get frankincense for next year.
And then gold, but I'm going to keep that in a safe or something.
These were all very expensive and valuable gifts.
None of these three things that were presented to the Lord Jesus were cheap.
Here's what I want you to see, and we're about done.
The value of the gifts themselves were a measure of the value of the recipient
to the one who gave the gift.
They brought him gold and frankincense and myrrh, all three very valuable items,
and they gave them to Jesus, which is to say, Lord, you are worth all of this.
This is just a token. You are worth way more than this. Jesus, you are worthy.
You see, you think about our monetary gifts, but not just the valuables and treasures that we have
as far as monetary things, although that's definitely included. The other valuable things,
some of which we've already covered, like our time, our life, the years of our life,
our wisdom, our know-how, our knowledge, our family,
all of the things in our life that are valuable, Jesus is worthy of all of them.
Many times what we do with our money and our possessions
is an indication of where our heart is. That's a scriptural principle.
Right here, they gave possessions, they sacrificed valuable things,
and that's in no way is it is that any different than it is today.
When we use our possessions to glorify the Lord Jesus, when we give them to him,
is an act of worship. We're saying, Lord, you're worthy of all the money in my bank account.
Lord, you're worthy of all the possessions that I have. You're worthy of my time, my years,
my health, my wisdom, all that I have, all that I am. You deserve it all.
So the wise men gave the Lord Jesus three gifts, their journey, their worship,
and their treasures, and by doing so made a clear statement that Jesus was worthy. Let's pray.