In Micah 5 and verse 2, But thou,
Bethlehem, Thethra, through, if you look at this
scripture, it says, Though thou be little among
the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee
shall he come forth unto me, that is
to be the ruler of Israel, whose goings
forth have been from old, from everlasting.
Now, when we think about this little town
of Bethlehem, we find it mentioned in the
Old Testament in Micah chapter 5.
Keeping a promise is very important.
When you tell someone you're going to do
something, you ought to try to keep your
word.
It's important that when you make a promise,
I promise that you especially go out of
your way to keep your word.
The fact that we have such a wonderful
and a great God is the fact that
He made a lot of promises, and God
has kept His word.
And in Micah 5, He promised that there
would be a ruler coming forth, and His
promise was kept.
But before Micah 5, there was a promise
when we look at Genesis chapter 3 in
the Old Testament in verse 15.
And God made another promise.
He said, And I will put enmity between
thee and the woman, and between thy seed
and her seed.
It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt
bruise his heel.
Way back in the third chapter of Genesis,
God promised there was going to be a
cure for sin.
In Micah 5 and verse 2, God promised
a Savior would be born, and He even
told the city that He would be born.
There's three things that God has promised us.
He's promised that there would be a cure
for sin.
He promised, secondly, that a Messiah would be
born.
And He said, I'll tell you the city
of the Savior's birth.
It appears today, in the world and the
culture that we're living in, that when we
have a God that's promising to cure sin
and to send a Savior, and to be
so specific about keeping His promise, that in
our world that we're living in, not only
is a promise not very valuable anymore, not
only do people lie and not keep their
word anymore, but we find out that life
itself has gotten very cheap.
We don't value life, let alone our word,
like we used to.
When I go to keep a promise, or
you go to keep a promise, it's very
important because of our family and our friends.
But you think what it means to us
today that we can believe the promises of
God.
You think what it means in today's world
that when we read, He said, I promise
I'll never leave you, and I'll never forsake
you.
What that means.
You think about what it means when He
says, I will not put on you more
than you're able to bear.
What that means.
I like that promise.
He said, and if I go away, I
will come again.
I like that promise.
Promises bring a blessing, and they bring great
joy.
But today's culture, we're not seeing a lot
of joy.
We're not seeing a lot of blessings, because
we've cheapened our word, we've cheapened our promises,
and we've even cheapened life.
Think about, for just a moment, the violence
of our television.
Think about the violence of our movies.
Think about how we're feeding on the bottom
of the things of this world.
We've lost the very values that made us
a great nation.
Killing and the taking of life has actually
become entertainment in our culture.
The violence and murder that we see playing
out on our television, playing out in the
movie screen, playing out in the rental movie,
that we now even have rental CDs, rental
DVDs and movies with such titles as The
Faces of Death, where you can actually rent
a video or a DVD and watch human
beings die for over an hour for your
evening's entertainment.
Murders, executions, tragedies, watching people die has become
a part of our culture.
The violence and murder that we're seeing take
place in the world of abortion.
One evidence that our society has cheapened is
that every year, 1,500,000 little babies
are aborted.
One of the most graphic testimonies I've ever
had given to me.
I was preaching in the Tri-Cities area
of Tennessee and a charge nurse came up
to me during the invitation of the service
and she was so broken and weeping.
She said, I'm about to lose my mind.
I can't go on.
I can't take it.
And finally, one of the ladies there, the
pastor's wife, sat her on the front row
and we began to talk and I said,
what is the problem?
And she said, I have to work with
the general hospital in my city and we're
having to assist with the abortion process.
And she said, I just keep hearing those
little babies.
She said, they're still alive when we put
them in the trash can.
She said, how can we be so cruel?
You know, we have gotten so callous that
we're not even keeping the promise that we
made to our own children to love them
and to protect them and to take care
of them.
The internet death sites, the suicide pages, and
even the death clubs where you can join.
You can find a place where people are
actually uniting on the internet and saying at
a certain time, we'll take our lives together.
Or they'll encourage other people.
We're seeing in our culture the war and
rumors of war.
The roadside bombs and the suicide bombers.
They don't value their own lives and they
cheapen the life of others.
Whether they walk into a wedding or whether
they go into a subway or crash a
plane into an office building field with innocent
people.
But besides cheapening life, we're seeing that our
children are now being polluted.
The video games of today.
The grand theft autos.
The remakes.
These actual games that are becoming so realistic
with sight and sound.
They're seeing the mutation of morality into the
murder and violent themes.
The stabbing.
The wrecks.
The violent destruction of the human body brought
to vivid color on the screen.
Nudity.
Lust.
Passion.
Shootings.
Mayhem.
Chaos.
And murder.
Has become entertainment for our children.
We're feeding our kids no longer Mickey Mouse
and Donald Duck.
No longer do they have the innocence of
some cartoon character.
But now we're taking them to another level.
Literally opening the doors to the darkness.
The halo has evolved into the occult.
Where we take them to the darker side
of life.
We've seen the news 24-7 explosion.
We wake up to news.
We go to bed with news.
We get in our car listening to news.
And it's filled with shocking and spectacular headlines
of crime and violence and man's inhumanity to
man.
As we find that the life that God
gave has been cheapened over and over again.
Most of the headlines, just think about it,
that lead the story, lead the telecast, lead
the newspaper, are those that are the most
violent.
The most deadly.
The most spectacular.
The TV and the radio and the paper.
You know, we don't even carry the real
good news of a town.
You see, the real good news, I believe,
would be over at the hospital when those
little boys and girls are brought into the
world.
Natalie, how old is your baby?
Six weeks old.
Would she write with a preacher a minute?
Maybe, maybe.
The day she was born, the paper didn't
carry a headline.
Channel 13 didn't do a story.
Tracy, when your babies came into this world,
CBS and NBC weren't there.
Sometimes we miss the big news.
God gave a life.
God gave a treasure.
He gave us little boys and little girls.
Brought them in to the household of faith.
Get this passage, Mama, before it falls.
I would be in big trouble if we
dropped the passage.
There we go.
A gift.
Life.
You and your wife cannot have the power
of creation.
God gave life.
If you're here and you're a parent or
a grandparent, you know and I know that
God is the miracle giver.
How could we cheapen the value of one
child, one boy, one girl?
How could we take from our world that
we're living in and say, we're going to
throw this little child away or we're going
to throw this little boy away?
How can we throw away a 20-year
-old?
How can we throw away a man that's
45 and a woman that's 58?
How can we throw away a woman in
a nursing home that's having her 95th birthday?
But if we don't have revival in America,
that's exactly where we're headed because now they're
already talking about, well, we just need to
get rid of our old people.
We can practice euthanasia when they're no longer
able to hold down a job.
The cheapening of life is deadly.
But when I study history, I find out
that history really does repeat itself.
We never pay attention to what really matters.
We're watching the headlines today of Iraq.
We're watching the leader in Iran say that
we ought to drive the Jews into the
Mediterranean and eradicate the nation of Israel.
And we're finding out that we're talking about
North Korea and South Korea.
We're finding out we're talking about the events
and the politics of Washington, D.C. But
no one's covering the story of the babies
being born today.
The children that are at our feet.
The two-year-old and the three-year
-old.
And the responsibility that we have as moms
and dads and husbands and wives and grandparents
to invest our lives in loving another generation.
The year was 1809.
And the world was doing the same thing
as we're doing today.
They were watching the newspapers of the day.
Watching the nation of Austria.
They were not watching Great Britain and its
English-speaking world.
They were not even watching across the Atlantic
the United States and its English-speaking world.
They were watching Europe and the nations of
Europe.
They were watching a French leader named Napoleon
Bonaparte as his armies were ripping through Europe.
And they were finding out as he went
through the villages of the countries and his
bloody battles and death scenes.
Those were the headlines of 1809.
Napoleon was invading.
And he was now in 1809 in the
campaigns of Austria and the battles that were
being held there.
Who cares about the births of babies?
Who cares about babies and milk bottles when
Napoleon's mighty army is marching?
What significance could come out of the cradles
and the cribs of 1809?
Life is cheap.
Europe was the focus and the headline.
Who cared about any baby born in the
English-speaking nations of Great Britain and America?
The whole world's watching France.
Europe, that's the headline of the day.
The violence of men.
But my friend, in 1809, if someone would
have checked the cribs and the cradles, they
would have seen a host of leaders and
scholars and thinkers and scientists were coming into
the world that year.
William Gladstone was born in Liverpool in 1809.
Alfred Tennyson began his life in Lincolnshire in
the year 1809.
Oliver Wendell Holmes made his first cry in
Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1809.
And just a few miles away, Edgar Allan
Poe started his tragic life in Boston, Massachusetts.
Oh, by the way, 1809, there was a
doctor, a physician named Darwin and his wife
and they had a little son.
And he was born in 1809 and they
called him Charles.
Also that year, we have the appearance of
Robert Charles Winthrop.
And over in Hardin County, Kentucky, there's an
illiterate farm laborer that has a rustic log
cabin.
And in that log cabin, 1809, to parents
who could not read or write, a little
baby boy was born.
They named him Abraham Lincoln, 1809.
Many times the devil and the world gets
people looking in the wrong direction.
The treasure of a local church is not
what's happening in Raleigh or in Washington, D
.C. The treasure's back there in the nursery
over in the K-4, the K-5,
and the first grade class, and the seventh
grade class, and the college and careers.
It's a young married couple that we ought
to be investing our life and resources in
that we would know that we'd love some
senior saint that's gotten down to where they
can't even be in the house of God
anymore because the little old tabernacle is worn
out and the legs and limbs are weak.
And they've been faithful to love God in
this local church, and they've faithfully prayed and
given that there'd be a light over the
lighthouse.
There needs to be someone to love them
today and say, yeah, it's a mean old
world.
Yes, the headlines are filled with violence, but
we still believe in the good news, the
Lord Jesus Christ that takes away the sins
of the world.
And He's still the great shepherd for all
of His people.
You see, many times we're given the idea
of looking the wrong way.
The newspaper said the history of the world
in 1809 was in the Austrian campaign.
But truly, the historical events of 1809 came
out of who was born that year.
What they thought was super significant to the
world was Europe and Napoleon.
But what really they thought was insignificant were
a group of babies born in England and
in the United States who had the power
to change the world.
There's a reason we have a church.
There's a reason we're investing in a place
to teach and disciple and to mentor.
There's a reason that we want the children
to have the right kind of music and
the right kind of fellowship.
There's a reason.
The reason is that that is the treasure
that God has entrusted to us.
When you've been married 20 years and you
have a week that rips the very heart
out of your chest, that you can walk
in to the church on Sunday morning and
hear the congregation sing, Does Jesus Care?
Oh, yes He cares!
I know He cares!
When your very faith has been rattled that
you can walk into the house of God
and hear the choir singing, How Firm a
Foundation!
Ye saints of the Lord that you know
your God is alive and well.
Your world may be melting down, but God's
got first aid for your faith at the
house of God, the promises of God, the
power of God, and the presence of God.
We can only introduce part of the study
today dealing with the promises, keeping a promise.
But you can be rest assured that God
keeps the power in His hand as well
as His promise.
And what I cannot do and what you
cannot do, we can find through the promise
of God and the power of God and
the presence of God that we have access
to this God in prayer.
And we can pray and we can call
upon this God and He will not turn
a deaf ear to your need.
You see, the day and hour that we're
in, we're feeding on the wrong things.
We're feeding on the things that do not
lift us up spiritually or emotionally.
We need to get back to feeding on
the things of the Lord.
God even tells us in His Word that
we ought to think on those things which
are good.
And I'm afraid our whole society is thinking
on anything but what is good.
The world didn't notice when God promised a
Messiah in the book of Micah.
Have you noticed they didn't pay any attention?
He said He's going to be born.
Genesis 3, God said there's a Messiah coming.
Micah 5, He said He will be born
and He'll be born not only on earth.
He said I'll tell you where He's going
to be born.
He'll be born in Bethlehem.
The day and hour of that world's media,
that world's buzz, they were all preoccupied with
the great Roman Empire.
Two thousand years ago, the world was talking
about the powerful and the rich, the great
Caesar and the wealth and the splendor of
Rome.
They were talking about all of the Colosseums.
They were talking about the aqueducts, the architecture.
They were talking about the vast and the
vicious.
They were talking about the Roman Empire.
They were talking about the political intrigue, et
tu brutus.
They were talking about the crime and the
passion and the immorality, the military might.
That's what they were all feeding on.
Jerusalem, Israel, the house of God, even the
temple was controlled by mighty Rome.
Rome had the power.
All eyes were on Augustus.
He ruled the world.
Augustus had the power.
No one even thought about the prophets.
No one even talked about what they had
recorded.
No one remembered Genesis 3.15. Rome's in
power.
They were actually living the life of wealth
and prosperity.
No one was talking about Micah 5.
They were talking about how Rome was building
a superhighway, the Roman way, the Roman road,
that all roads lead to Rome, that they
actually started in Rome and went north, east,
south, and west, went one mile and put
down a road marker.
You thought that a mile marker was something
new that the North Carolina Department of Transportation
had put up.
The DOT's good, but they're not that good.
The Romans had mile markers before we had
them in North Carolina.
Say amen, Jeff.
You know that.
And here we are.
We're living and seeing the might and the
power of Rome.
And they went north, east, south, and west,
and went mile one, mile two, so that
when you got anywhere in Europe, you got
down in Jerusalem, you got down in Egypt,
and there'd be a mile marker telling you
how many miles it was back to Rome.
All eyes were on Augustus.
And Augustus had the power, and he demanded
that a census be taken so the whole
world could be taxed.
He had an ulterior motive.
Who would even notice a little couple living
way up in Nathras?
Sort of a strange story about them.
They were sort of a gossip of Nathras.
They were only engaged, and yet Mary already
was showing she was going to have a
baby.
Did you hear about them?
Joseph, did you hear what she said at
the well yesterday?
She said, I've never been with Joseph.
Yeah, right.
Who would believe such a thing?
He said that an angel came to him
and told him to love her and to
take care of her.
I think they're sort of spooky myself.
I think they've gone to church too much.
I think they've read the old prophet books
way too much.
No one's paying any attention to Mary and
Joseph.
As they travel 80 miles from Nathras, headed
down to the city of David, to be
enrolled in the census and to be taxed.
No, no, the world's too big, it's too
bad.
While the gladiators are in the Colosseum, the
mighty armies of Rome are marching in with
the treasures as they conquer nation after nation.
The whole world's talking about Rome and its
power.
The gladiators and the animals are entertaining the
people.
They're caught up and intoxicated on the pleasures
of life.
Never been a better time to live.
Never had more wealth.
Never had more free time.
Never had more entertainment than any generation.
No one's thinking about a little couple up
in Nathras that's traveling to be taxed, ruled
by a justice, who would pay any attention.
What's more important?
Caesar?
Rome?
Or a Jewish baby?
Or a little town in the middle of
nowhere called Bethlehem?
The world is still rocking from the life
of Alexander the Great.
The world is still reeling from the effects
of Herod the Great.
They're still living under the ruling power of
Augustus the Great.
Who even noticed that Mary had a little
lamb?
No one.
Jesus was His name.
And the Bible said that God kept His
promise.
Genesis 3, 15.
He said, help is on the way.
Micah 5, 2.
He's coming.
Here's where He's going to be born.
Luke 2, 11.
For unto you is born this day in
the city of David a Savior, glory to
God, which is Christ the Lord.
If God promises to help, He always does.
And He always will.
God keeps His promises.
For unto you is born this day.
Would you please join with me in saying
this powerful verse together?
Let's say it together.
For in the city.
Unto who?
You.
Is born this day in the city of
David.
Let's bow our heads.
Father, the very plan...