Wednesday, December 21, 2005

"Lessons From Narnia" Series: The Unexpected Visitor

(This is the third/last message in the series spoken on Dec. 18.)




















I want to start with a story I found...

Long ago, there was a wise and good king who ruled in Persia. He loved his people. He wanted to know how they lived. He wanted to know about their hardships.

So this is what he did...

He dressed in the clothes of a working man or a beggar, and went to the homes of the poor. No one he visited ever realized that he was their ruler.

Once he visited a very poor man who lived in a cellar. He ate the coarse food the poor man ate and he spoke kind words to him.

Then he left. Later, he visited the poor man again and revealed his identity to him. He said, "I am your king!" The king thought that at that moment the man would definitely ask for some gift or favor, but he didn't.

Instead the poor man said, "You left your palace and your glory to visit me in this dark, dreary place. You ate the course food I ate. You brought gladness to my heart! To others you have given your rich gifts. To me you have given yourself!"

The man was overwhelmed by this unexpected visitor!

----

In “The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe”, Aslan, the great lion who created Narnia enters into their world. He comes to take back Narnia from the control of the evil White Witch.

I love how C.S. Lewis describes the way Narnia is under the Witch’s control! He says it’s “always winter but never Christmas.” But that all begins to change when Aslan comes!

Aslan is another unexpected visitor.

  • What if God, the author of life, decided to enter his own story and become a character in it?
  • What if he did it, like Aslan, to redeem back his people and to forever guarantee the plot line of His story (history) would be fulfilled as he originally planned?

In a manger, over two thousand years ago, born as a baby to a young teenage couple, the ultimate unexpected visitor came.

The Bible tells us the most amazing miracle happened: God stepped into our world and entered this story.

Today, I want to look at some of the parallels between “The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe” and the Bible.

I also want to remind you today that we live on what Christian author J.B. Phillips called “The Visited Planet”.

We're going to see that God came not only to show us the truth and redeem us, but he came to expose our greatest dreams as laughably too small!

I'll tell you more about what I mean by that later, but, first, listen to how Matthew describes this unexpected visitMatthew 1:18-25 NLT

Hear the message below...

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