The Nine Words of Christmas (1 Timothy 1:12-17)                                                               2009.12.20                                  Pastor Edward Cheng

Christmas gets more and more complicated as the years go by.  Getting a Christmas tree and Christmas lights for the house might mean going from place to place to place until you find somewhere they’re not sold out of all the good ones.  Church activities are also getting more complicated—the shopping last Wednesday for Love-A-Child gifts, and wrapping them on Thursday; on Friday Charis had their Christmas party; Saturday night Oasis had their Christmas party; today is Christmas Sunday, and soon it will be Christmas Eve and the evening service at church.  Not only that, we have family obligations and relatives to spend time with.  And some of us also have traveling to do for Christmas, on top of everything else.  

Today I want to simplify everything.  I’m going to give you the nine words of Christmas.  This whole message can be condensed into these nine words, in three phrases.  The purest, simplest message of Christmas comes from 1 Timothy 1:15: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”—nine words that summarize everything this holiday is about. 

Paul says in the beginning of the verse, “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance.”  He is prepping the reader for a saying packed with meaning.  One of the themes of this section (1:12-17) is the idea of faith.  He is writing to Timothy, who is a pastor dealing with teachers in his church who are straying from the gospel.  He tells us how important the message of the gospel is through this word “faith.”  In v. 12: “he considered me faithful.”  V. 13: “I acted in ignorance and un-faith.”  In v. 14: “the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.” In v. 15: “Here is a [faith] saying.”  V. 16: “those who would have faith.”  V. 19: “holding on to faith and a good conscience.”   Six times in two paragraphs, Paul weaves in this idea of faith, and in the middle of it he says, “Here is a faith statement.”  That is to say, what comes after this is, in a nutshell, our faith.

The first phrase of these nine words is: “Christ Jesus came into the world.”  This means Christmas Day, the day God entered the world in the person of Jesus.  The name Jesus is the Greek version of the Hebrew name Joshua, which means “Yahweh is salvation.”  His name alone already tells us what his purpose is going to be.  In addition, to say that “Christ Jesus came into the world” implies that he came into the world from another place—from heaven.  Jesus’ entire ministry rested on his claim: “I come from heaven.”  (See John 4:34, 5:24, 6:29, and 12:44 for examples.)  No other widely accepted religious leader in history ever claimed to be God, other than Jesus Christ.  Only Christianity claims that our God came to be with us.  “Christ Jesus came into the world” means that Jesus is our Savior, our God, and he is from heaven, and there is no one like him. 

The next phrase is “to save.”  Here we find out the entire reason why he came.  Christmas makes no sense if you don’t also believe in Easter.  You might as well celebrate my birthday!  Christmas is about Jesus Christ coming into the world to save.  He came into the world to serve people, and to be a sacrifice.  I’m going to suggest that coming into the world to save us, and to suffer and die, was not a desirable thing for Jesus, but he said, “I’ll do it.”  In these two words, “to save,” we have his display of love, his sacrifice, his selflessness, and his intense purpose to do what needed to be done to save us.  In these two words, we have what we might call the “Christmas spirit.”  Even nonbelievers understand this idea of Christmas spirit—it means spending time at a soup kitchen, giving to the poor.  It means charity, giving, sacrifice.

The third phrase is the last word: “sinners.”  That’s us.  In one word, the author universalizes our helpless state.  Jesus did not come to save the good ones—he came to save a fallen, unclean, needy people.  Paul puts us all in the same category.  Maybe for us this means that around Christmas time, we should have a little more patience for each other, be more gracious to one another, and recognize that none of us is better than the others.  We are all redeemed under the grace of Jesus Christ. 

Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.  In nine words, we find grace, mercy, our helplessness, God recognizing our state and rescuing us, and God’s willingness to endure suffering.  If you only remember nine words from Scripture, when you’re sharing the gospel with someone, remember these.