Discover Peace Through O Come All Ye Faithful

TRANSCRIPT 

Be here, O faithful, joyfully triumphing, come, come to Bethlehem. Behold, he who is born the King of angels, come, let us adore the Lord. God of God, light of light, he who the pregnant maiden's organs bear. Very God, begotten, not created, come, let us adore the Lord. is what you would be singing today if a guy hadn't stepped in in the 1800s and massaged the words a little bit so we weren't singing about Megan, Maiden's organs.

So we can say thank you to Frederick, uh, for that. So today we are doing O Come All Ye Faithful. It's one of the, just one of the best Christmas carols. It's a crowd favorite. It's usually at the end of a big Christmas event because it's such a, like a, you know, everyone's standing up and singing. It's very anthemic in the way that it goes.

Everyone loves it. And it's got Some cool history like all the other, I mean, I've really enjoyed learning about the history. of the carols, where they came from, who wrote them, because we take for granted they've been around our whole lives. So this one, um, we don't a hundred thousand percent know who wrote it.

There's a few different ideas out there. There's Cistercian monks and some other people. The most popular theory or most of the evidence points to King John IV of Portugal in the 17th century. His daughter wrote a book about it and she talked about her dad writing those lyrics. But, it didn't become popular until, um, a man named John Francis Wade in 1745.

So, John Francis Wade was a, um, music teacher and he was also a copyist. So, back then they used to have people whose job was just to copy things out because they didn't have ways of doing it. Copying and printing easily. So, uh, his job was to do that and he would find these obscure songs and he would copy them and then he would sell them onto musicians so they could learn to play.

So this was a song that he found and he wrote it out in Latin and he added some extra verses, um, that we don't sing anymore. And then about a hundred years later, an Anglican priest named Frederick Oakley. translated it from English, sorry, from Latin into English. And that what I read earlier was the direct translation from the Latin.

And then he just kind of fixed it up a little bit, um, so that it sounded a bit better as more easy to sing. And then over time, lots of different famous composers have come along and added their mark to it. And now we have the song that we sing today. That's how that got here. And the lyrics of this song are really amazing.

And I was just talking to someone earlier. We were talking about how beautiful carols are. And I was saying, the problem is we sing these songs. literally from when we're drooling babies, we hear these songs every single year. And so as the years go on, we kind of forget about the meaning of the words. We just, we sing them because that's what we do at Christmas.

But when you look at the lyrics of this song, they're really awesome. So we're going to take a couple of minutes to look at this. I'm actually going to skip the first verse and go to the second because one thing I noticed when I was looking at this carol is it talks a lot about angels, heaps of emphasis on angels.

The whole second verse says this, sing choirs of angels, sing in exultation, sing all ye citizens of heaven above, glory to God, glory in the highest. The really cool thing about this song is that so much of it is taken directly from scripture. So if we look at something that was written by a man named Luke, he, um, wrote out the whole Christmas story using eyewitness accounts and things like that.

So one thing he wrote was this. He tells the story of. The shepherds. And he says this, this is Luke 2. He says shepherds were in the fields near Bethlehem. They were taking turns watching their flock during the night. An angel from the Lord suddenly appeared to them. The glory of the Lord filled the microphone with sound.

Should I switch? Yeah, yeah. This is the first time! That is the first time it hasn't worked for me. All right, what was I up to? Um, an angel, okay, the shepherds were taking turns watching their flock during the night. An angel from the Lord suddenly appeared to them. The glory of the Lord filled the area with light and they were terrified.

The angel said to them, no, no, don't be afraid. I have good news for you. A message that will fill everyone with joy. Today, Your Saviour, Christ the Lord, was born in David's city. That's Bethlehem. This is how you'll recognize him. You'll find an infant wrapped in strips of cloth and lying in a manger.

Suddenly, a large army of angels appeared with the angel. So if the shepherds were terrified by one angel, they just got surrounded by, I don't even know, tens of thousands of angels. They were praising God by saying, Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth. Peace to those who have his goodwill. Can we see the similarity?

It's pulled directly from Luke. And what I love about that section and what, um, the, Oh no, we don't have it. No, we do. The lyrics of it. The awesome thing about it is it's such an amazing image because it shows us, and I think the author did this deliberately, to show us the gravity and the enormity of what was happening that night.

This was not an event where. Oh yeah, this baby's been born and a few angels come down and they're like, oh okay, yeah, yeah, oh yeah, God said that would happen. Yeah, that's cool. Oh, good one, Mez. Mary, that's a beautiful baby, Mary. Like, this wasn't a tiny thing. This was something that the veil between heaven and earth was torn open and as Ruth said, love came down and here is God in human form, a vulnerable baby right there that we could see and touch and feel.

This was something that turned the whole world on its axis. This was something that had been promised since the beginning of creation, that this one event of such enormous magnitude would happen. And it was so enormous that a hundred thousand angels came to celebrate and say, glory to God and peace to all of those.

It's really saying that this event was not just for us on earth. This was something that all of the heavens celebrated as well. And I think that's what the author of this song wanted us to understand. And even the supernatural beings were worshipping him. And I love that the song says, Sing in exultation.

Exultation means triumphant jubilation. Overwhelming rejoicing. That's the level of rejoicing that these angels were doing. And if the angels were doing that, how much more should we be rejoicing? Mm. Because remember that this was our Saviour, Christ the Lord, born for us, born in David's city. And then if we go back to the first verse, we all know this one.

O come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant. O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem, come and behold him, born the king of angels. And I've often wondered, why does it say king of angels? We never really refer to Jesus like that. Why doesn't it say king of earth or king of humanity or something like that? Again, I think it's giving us perspective on this because there's something that one of Jesus disciples wrote down and he said that Jesus has gone into heaven.

This is after Jesus was crucified and resurrected. He's gone into heaven. He's at the right hand of God with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him. It's giving us a picture of the power and the majesty of Jesus. But here he is in human form on earth with us. So this first line, O come all ye faithful, joyful, and triumphant.

I realized a few weeks ago, there's two ways you can interpret this line. And it was interesting because I had a conversation with someone and we had two very different interpretations of it. So I thought I'd ask you what you think. So you could interpret it as, O come all ye faithful, joyful, and triumphant.

If you are those things, it is time to come and worship Jesus. Or, it could be, O come, all ye faithful, and come with joy and triumph, because now it's time to worship Jesus. So, there's no prizes for getting it right, but put your hand up if you think it's the first one. O come, all ye faithful, joyful, and triumphant, it's time to worship Jesus.

to come and worship Jesus? Does anyone think it's that? You can put, it's no like shame or anything, no one's gonna get, yeah a few people, a few people are going like this because no one wants to commit. Um, what about the second one? Oh come all you faithful and come with joy and triumph. Great. Okay. Some people did not commit at all either way.

That's fine. So I actually gave you the answer at the very beginning. The line in the direct translation from the Latin says, be here, O faithful, joyfully triumphing. That comma, how you interpret that comma makes a really big difference because when we understand what this song is talking about, it changes the whole meaning of the song.

It's saying, all of you who love God. Now it's time to come with joy and triumph in your heart. So if we look at these two words, joyful and triumphant, because they've been very specifically chosen. Joyful is easy to understand. The world is rejoicing. This baby's been born. The savior is here. Even the angel said, I'm bringing you a message.

It's going to bring a lot of joy to a lot of people. So we can understand joyful. But Triumphant is a really interesting one. And if you think about it in the context of this song, and you think, okay, there's all these people, they, you know, the author is saying, come descend on Bethlehem. It's time to rejoice.

So you can imagine a lot of people walking down to Bethlehem. And if they're walking triumphantly, what would that look like? They might be, I don't know, marching. They might be like heads held high. They're just like, they've got the confidence. Maybe there's trumpets playing or people singing. You know, there's banners waving.

That's triumph, right? That's what you would imagine is a triumphant march towards something. And when we see people being triumphant like that, what has usually happened? Well, they've won something. Triumph can only happen after a victory. And Jesus brought the greatest victory that the world had ever seen.

And now we live in the triumph of that victory. That's why these people could come and they were invited symbolically through this song to come back to Jesus, back to his birth, to recognize his life with joy and triumph in our hearts because of who he was, who he would become and what he would do for us.

So this carol is really an anthem of the love and adoration that we should have for Jesus. So that first night was the first victory. The next stage of God's plan was unfolding. Faithful Jewish people had been waiting hundreds of years for this to happen. How triumphant for them to see this finally happening, because hundreds of years earlier, people had been prophesying that this would happen.

God had been telling people, they had been writing it down. The most famous one was by a man named Isaiah, who had an enormous vision from God while he was in a temple, really shook him up and he wrote the whole thing down. And he predicted everything that would happen in the whole Christmas story with incredible accuracy.

So I'm going to read you, and he was born, he was around 742 years before Jesus. And this is what he said in Isaiah, Isaiah 7, this is from. Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. This is going to come directly from God. The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and we'll call him Emmanuel.

What does Immanuel mean? Does anyone know? You can shout it out. God is with us. Even that is amazing. God is now with us here. No longer separated from us. So that's the first victory. This was God's Son, human in body, fully God, here on earth. The next victory was Jesus life. He spent three years. Going around and living and loving radically.

He was a victory over the way that people had always lived. He was a victory over anger, oppression, greed, selfishness, corruption. And then he was sent to be a sacrifice for us. That was always in God's plan. He died on a cross, the world went dark. He took on the weight of sin. But three days later, he came back a victory over death.

And that. is the era that we live in now, that era of triumph. You can't have triumph without victory, and the victory has already happened. It happened 2000 years ago. And nothing that happens, and it's funny, we've talked about this so much this morning, nothing that happens, and Jesus is very specific about this too, he says it many times, nothing can happen to us in our lives.

Nothing that someone says or does to you, no difficulty that happens, no circumstance, no matter how deep and painful, can change the victory of Jesus being born on that night in an event so momentous that armies of angels came to celebrate.

It was the beginning of the fulfillment of a promise that would change everyone's lives forever. Ours, we live in that era now. It happened to change our lives now. That we would have a new way to live, a new strength, a peace that no one else can understand. So, if we remember back to what the army of angels were singing, they were singing glory to God in the highest, which is in our song.

They say glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth. Peace to those who have his goodwill. So they're saying now there's going to be peace for those who follow God. Jesus himself told us over and over that he would bring peace to your soul. That was part of his role. And one of my, I have a few favourite scriptures, but this is one of them.

Um, a disciple of his, John. wrote this down. John wrote down a lot of things that Jesus said. So this is Jesus talking. He said to his disciples, peace, I leave with you. My peace, I give to you. I don't give to you as the world does. He's saying peace. My peace is not going to look like relaxing on a Sunday afternoon in your backyard with an Aperol spritz going.

It's quiet for a minute. It's good. Everything's okay. That's not the kind of peace that Jesus is talking about. He's saying the peace that I give to you. You will not understand and the world cannot give to you because it is a deep assurance. It is a security. It is a confidence. It is a resilience. It is a courage that is available to us because we live in the era of triumph after the victory of Jesus.

Uh, my best friend from high school. Um, she was a Christian when we were in school. I was not. She was very gentle and very patient with me. Um, she's an amazing person. Always very mature for her age. And she, uh, got married in her 20s to an amazing guy. And they always were very active in the church. And a few years after that, they fell pregnant, a little girl.

And she was born at 26 weeks. She lived for about 45 minutes and passed away. And then a couple of years later, they fell pregnant again, a little boy. And he was born at 24 weeks and he lived for about four days. And then they had to let him go and watch him pass away as well. A couple of years after that, they were sent down to Tasmania to be pastors of a church.

It was the first time they'd been pastors. They were very excited, change of scenery. And Tasmania was perfect. Her husband absolutely loved hiking and backpacking and things like that. And Tasmania is like 99 percent national park, so he was happy. And he was very experienced. And one day he went off on a, uh, trip.

hike like he normally did. He had all of his safety staff and provisions and whatever in case he ended up staying overnight. That was pretty normal. So he didn't come home that one night and that was fine, but he didn't come home the next day either. And then they sent out a search party and two days later they found his body.

And to this day, they still don't even know what he died from. And I remember getting the phone call from another friend of ours, our other school friend, the three of us were all besties. And this other friend called me and she told me, and I remember I was standing in my kitchen and I had my two little boys.

They were probably one and. Three or four playing on the floor and I hung up the phone and I said to my husband My best friend just buried her entire family and we are 32 years old all of them a husband a daughter and a son and She had to come over to the mainland to Victoria because that's where her husband's family was from and she managed to come up for the weekend and we got To spend an afternoon together and I remember she walked in and I was just a mess.

I mean my Hey Grief for her was overwhelming. I couldn't believe it. And she walked in and I gave her this massive hug and I said to her, I'm so sorry for everything you've lost. And she hugged me really tight. And then she kind of put me at arm's length and she looked me right in the eye. And she said, I didn't lose anything because Jesus already won.

That's the kind of unearthly peace that only Jesus gives. That absolute, solid foundation of it is okay because Jesus has me and he is in control, and no matter what is going on up here, I know that I belong to Jesus and he already won this. He is the victor over everything that happens here on earth because of his birth, life, death, and resurrection.

At one point, Jesus is talking to his disciples and he's telling them, I'm gonna be arrested, I'm gonna be crucified. And they don't get it. They are so confused. They're saying, Jesus, what is going on? And he ends up saying to them, I've told you these things so that in me you may have peace. He's saying, I know you don't get it.

I know things are gonna be difficult and probably even maybe harder once he's gone, but he's saying in me through me. You will have peace. That is what I am here for through the Holy Spirit. That is the peace. And then it's interesting. Nancy said this this morning already in this world, you will have trouble, but take heart.

I have overcome the world. Nothing is bigger than me. And that phrase, take heart. It doesn't mean don't worry or hey, stop stressing. It more closely relates, like translates to have courage, have courage, stay strong, be firm. I am here. I am your firm foundation. There will be suffering, but you don't have to struggle through the suffering.

That's the position that my friend was in. And it blew my mind. I think I was more of a mess than she was. Her calmness was honestly otherworldly. So I want to invite the band up. We are going to sing this carol together in a minute. Um,

I might regret saying this. Uh, I, I only wrote this message on Thursday. So three days ago, I wrote, I wrote this. Um, my first excuse is that I was really busy. I know heaps of us know this. I'm not an island and how busy it is in the lead up to Christmas. We've still got three kids in school. So the end of the school year is always just zany.

And I think we had about three or four weeks where we had something on every single day. night. Like there was just always something that had to be thought about, planned for, something bought, organized, attended every single time. There was so much going on. And then in that, just please work 40 hours a week and also look after your kids who are now all home.

Um, so there's all of that. It was just crazy. I, again, I know heaps of us feel like that. Um, I don't know when Christmas went from being miraculous to just stressful, I don't know, but anyway, that's how it's been. But then on top of that, uh, there's just been a lot of other stuff. I've had a lot of very big things happening over the last couple of months that have been very, um, I would say emotionally, a lot of weight to different things that have been going on.

And I think some of those situations had me feeling quite helpless and I guess a bit overwhelmed. And then very annoyingly, I had a couple of symptoms come back from stuff that I thought I had fixed a long time ago. And to have them come back felt so disheartening. Like I'd just gone 10 steps backwards in this very long, hard journey of health.

Um, and one of them was, um, suffocating fatigue. If you know what I mean by that, if you know, you know, um, it's the kind of fatigue that is so heavy. It feels like a blanket on you that you cannot get off you. It is so heavy and you are so tired you can't get it off. And anyone who knows, you don't have to put your hand up if you know, you know, I'm talking about all my fatigue friends are just like, yes, I get it.

I went, you know, um, so there's that. And then, uh, I could feel because of all of this happening all at the same time, I started to get all these old feelings of, panic coming up. And I haven't had a panic attack in like six or seven years. So to have that starting to kind of boil up in my stomach was really scary.

Again, I just felt like I was going so far backwards so quickly. And so every time I sat down to write this message, I knew what I wanted to say. I'd had it in my mind and in my heart for weeks. Every time I looked at this blank page, I felt so blocked up. I felt like I couldn't get. It was just like congested.

I couldn't get it from here onto this blank piece of paper to put it into some kind of coherent form. Um,

and so I, I actually got to the point this week where I was like, I don't think I'm going to have a message. I think I'm going to get up here and read these carols, like the lyrics, and we're just going to go, let's sing it 17 times. Guys, we've got 25 minutes to fill. Um, But then I had to come into the Junction just to do something really quickly.

I ended up having an impromptu conversation with my friend Ruth. And just in this chatting, she said a few things that I realised, if I sort of, you know, paraphrase them into what I realised for myself, was that I had to ask, well, Pauline, what have you been focusing on? Where have you been putting your focus?

Mind and your heart. What have you set your feet on? And I realized nothing. I was being Completely blown around tossed by every single thing that was coming along every circumstance every emotion every feeling I was just all over the place. I had stopped living in the victory. I was a victim to all of these huge things that were happening.

And I forgot about the victory of Jesus and that peace that takes us through those kinds of things and the stuff will all still happen. It'll all still be there. It still has to be solved, but we can either struggle through it or we can sit in the peace of Jesus while we go through it. And there's a beautiful, um, scripture in Hebrews.

I won't read the whole thing because it's quite long, but I'll read the first bit. It says, in Hebrews 6, it says, We have this hope, that's the hope of Jesus, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul. I had totally let go of my anchor. And so I spent Wednesday, I mean, that anchor is, that's the triumph that we live in.

And I spent a bit of time on Wednesday, because I didn't have much time, but a little bit of time, and I spent a little bit of time re anchoring myself. And really thinking about, well, what do I want you to take away from today? And I think if I had to say one thing, it would be to ask if you are feeling the same way that I was feeling, re anchoring yourself is something that we have to do.

That's a choice we have to make. We get to choose whether we become a victim or whether we live in the victory. And I think anyone who says, no, it's too big, I want you to think of my friend from high school who lost her entire family. And she said, I didn't lose anything because Jesus has already won in my life.

There is nothing that separates us from the love and the victory of Jesus. So if that is something that you need to think about today, I really encourage you because I seriously have felt so much better in the last three days. Um, and hopefully this message came together. Okay. I'm sorry if it didn't, that's my fault for doing it three days ago.

Um, and triumphant victory can feel very small. But I would just really encourage you to fan that flame, and keep it going, and lean in, and make it grow bigger, and then eventually it's a rock that you stand on, and you become unshakable. Life will do things to you, but Jesus did something for you. We can't forget that.

So we're going to finish with this song. We're going to sing it together. I'm going to read something to you first. It's from Isaiah. He's the prophet who, uh, you know, talked all about what was going to happen when Jesus was born. And he wrote this section that has a lot of, um, names in there of Jesus.

They're all like roles of Jesus in our life or identities that he has. And I really love this and I want to read this. And then I think that our song can be our prayer. And I think we're just going to launch into it. But I'll start with this one. Isaiah 9 says. For a child has been born for us. A son given to us, given because he was a gift to us, given because he was a sacrifice.

Authority rests upon his shoulders, and he is named Wonderful Counselor. Because through the Holy Spirit, he counsels us, he guides us, he teaches us, and he comforts us. Mighty God, because we know that he sits at the right hand. of God above all other powers and authorities. He is the everlasting father. We know that he has been here since the beginning of creation.

He was the word and the word was with God and the word was God and that word is Jesus. And he is the prince of peace and unearthly peace that only Jesus can provide through the Holy Spirit. Great will be his authority, and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and uphold it with justice and righteousness from this time onward and forevermore.

We are living in the forevermore. It has happened, and we are living in the era of triumph after the victory of Jesus.