Luke 2:21-40          

Great Prayers Series         

Crofton Baptist December 2009

Advent gives us a great opportunity every year to reflect on a king whose birth changes everything. At Crofton we always want our Christmas celebrations to be a million miles away from that sentimental, slushy, cute-but-essentially-meaningless sense of British Christmas – it’s a nice time for the children. No, Christmas is a celebration of the earth-shattering, life-changing, God-encountering, worship-impelling day of days when the Lord Almighty stepped on to the stage and divided humanity in two – those who receive him and those who don’t.

But with advent – with all its familiar readings and festivals – over, its quite easy to miss the latter events in Luke 2. We jump straight to Jesus baptism and in to his ministry. And miss wonderful things for us to marvel at. Our reading is precisely about two people marvelling, being blown away in wonder at what God showed them one day in the temple in Jerusalem. That’s what I want to happen to me as I meet Jesus. And I want it to happen to you too. I’m praying that it will be happening even before the end of this message and then as we take the message and turn it into exultation.

Our passage tells us about two Old Testament believers, some of the last of the Old Covenant believers, Simeon and Anna in the temple in Jerusalem. Both meet the family of Jesus and see the infant, but see him in a special way. Other people saw a family performing ritual purification rites for a newborn. Simeon and Anna saw something much deeper and more profound than that. Two initial questions that we are meant to ask, therefore, is why do these two minor characters get into the Bible, and why did God show them something so extraordinary. Because you and I are minor characters in God’s story, but we want to be close to Jesus and we want God to reveal extraordinary things to us too. When I think about Simeon and Anna, I think about God with ordinary people, with us.

Why Are Simeon and Anna in The Bible?

For two people that we never meet again in the Bible, we are given a couple of quite detailed descriptive paragraphs about what they were like.

Simeon:

• Righteous and devout
• Waiting for the consolation of Israel – whatever that means, which we will see in a minute
• The Holy Spirit was upon
• The Holy Spirit was revealing to him that he wouldn’t die before he had seen God’s Christ, God’s anointed rescuer        

Anna:

• Old widow, widowed as a young woman
• A little bit about her family
• She was a prophetess, she had a commonly recognised revelatory gift from the Holy Spirit
• Seems to have lived the rest of her life after the death of her husband in devotion and worship, fasting and praying
• She was looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem

We don’t know what age Simeon was, its likely he was old. But whether old or young, what we have here are two prophetic people each waiting for something. Did you see that. The thing that leaps off the page to me are the things they have in common: the Holy Spirit of God is resting on them, that’s one thing, but what is the Holy Spirit doing to them? He is causing them to long for something. These are two people consumed with longing.

Consumed With Longing

The fuel of their lives is to see God do something. They are worshipping, praising, praying and fasting with regard to that longing. Which reminds me of Acts 13 and other passages. Acts 13 says that in the church in Antioch 6 decades after this scene, there were prophets and teachers who were worshipping and fasting when the Holy Spirit set apart people for the cause of global missions for the first time. When I hear about people worshipping and fasting in the Bible that sends me a signal – people serious about God, longing for God, longing for the supernatural work of the Spirit bringing God glory all over the world, that God almost always seems to respond to in power. That isn’t an instant formula – worship and fast and God will pitch up and act instantly, these people seem to have been seeking him for years or decades.

As we transition from 2009 to 2010, this is my keenest heart’s desire – that this church is yet more fuelled by deep longing to see God act. You know – because I keep saying it – that I think we should be on our knees over the fact that only 5% of this area have the slightest connection with a Bible-believing, God-centred, Christ-exalting church. I believing that we should be praying for 10% as a minimum start. I know that some of you have faith for a lot more than that over the coming year, and that is going to challenge us. None of our current structures are set up for 10%, we are set up for 5%. That’s uncomfortable for us. How are we going to press through discomfort? I will tell you the only way, and that is when our desire for God to work is burning more brightly than our desire for comfort. When we are fuelled up on passion for God, and being used in God’s ways to bring about God’s purposes for people coming to Jesus in Orpington and Petts Wood. When we are on our knees, worshipping, fasting and praying, then the power is present for breakthroughs.

The Consolation of God

Back to Simeon and Anna. What is this God-given, Spirit-empowered longing for. In v25 it says that Simeon’s life oriented around the fact that God had told him he would see his consolation. What does that mean? To get the sense of that you have to know a few verses from the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament that all Jews were very familiar with. The situation in Isaiah’s day, 700 years before this, was very bleak indeed for the people of God. Because they kept rebelling against God they were under his judgement. Their enemies beat them and they were finally taken away from Jerusalem and from the land of Judah into exile in Assyria and Babylon.

Actually that distress continued right up until Jesus came. Some Jews had returned to Jerusalem, but the distress hadn’t ended because the patterns of rebellion against God continued. The heart of distress wasn’t being punished and exiled, it was that they had no power stop sinning and turn back to God. Now, in the middle of all thins God did promise a time when he would deal with that core problem. He would enable people to turn back and would forgive their wickedness. He promises it most clearly through Isaiah, where he says I am going to send a redeemer who will bring my salvation – my rescue, my help – and he will bring it not only to the Jews but to the whole world too. He promised rescue that was unheard of in scope.  The consolation of God, the comfort he tenderly brings to his people, is that judgement is reversed and sin is taken away.

Isaiah 40:1 Comfort, comfort (or console) my people says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and proclaim to her that her warfare is ended, that her sin is pardoned

Isaiah 49: Sing, O Heavens and exult O Earth; break forth, O mountains into singing! For the Lord has comforted his people and will have compassion on his afflicted

Isaiah 53 says that God is going to achieve this comfort, this consolation, by giving a person who is an atoning sacrifice for sins. A substitute who carries my sin and takes the punishment I deserve

Simeon and Anna knew that. God’s people had been waiting hundreds of years and Simeon knew God would do it in his lifetime, he would see the rescuer, the consolation. No wonder his whole life was seized with it.

Simeon's Prayer

Let’s just take his prayer a verse at a time:

V29 God you have fulfilled your promise. Now let me depart in peace. It isn’t saying that he wants to die. He is saying that he has experienced the greatest thing in the universe that is so much more wonderful and important than his life, that his purpose and life-ambition is complete. He can go now with delight. Phil 1:21 – for to me to live is Christ and to die is gain. He got to see and hold in his arms the whole point of living. Magnifying Jesus Christ is the point of my life and your life and the world. That’s the point of creation. Simeon got that, prompted by the Spirit and exclaims in delight – that’s it, that’s it! Highest possible dream for my life accomplished

V30-31 Explains further what consolation means. My eyes have seen your salvation. You promised rescue but we haven’t seen it for hundreds of years. There has been a famine of the word of God, the presence of God, of God-activity for 400 years up till this point. Simeon says “I have been longing for the darkness to lift. Oh I don’t want to live in darkness. I don’t want the world to be covered by the gloom of sin. I am weary of sin. And my eyes have seen salvation available for all people, hallelujah”

V32 A glory for your people. You are going to lift the head of the Jews who believe, you are going to let them turn back to you and see and receive and live in your glory, because Jesus Christ is their glory. But you are going to do more than that. The Gentiles are now included. There is the light of life for them. Nobody in this room should ever just skip over verses that say God will rescue Gentiles. We have no special claim on him, we weren’t his Old Covenant people. We were excluded from participation with him, we didn’t have any of his promises. You ought to hear this and be on your face in worship and delight this morning.

Then Anna tacks on the end: he is going to be the redemption of Israel If consolation speaks about comfort from past injuries, the medicine to deal with the sickness of sin, then redemption declares that this child is also future hope of grace getting poured on us and of seeing and sharing in the glory of God.

Applications

What does God want from us in this passage? He wants us to be consumed with longing. If you aren’t a Christian he wants you to hear that there is a consolation who takes away sins, and he wants you to long for that. He will do it for you. If you are a Christian he wants you to delight in this salvation more in 2010 than in 2009. He wants Crofton Baptist Church to be full of people like Simeon and Anna, who whether they are old or young are inflamed with desire for this God, this Christ, this salvation. And he wants us to hope in him. To stand right up on tippy toe thrilled to see what the final redemption of God’s people is going to look like.

He wants you to marvel at the enormity of what he has done for your consolation. Do you see that’s what Mary and Joseph did? V33 The child’s father and mother marvelled at what was said about him. But even as they marvelled there was a sting. Because Simeon went on – this child isn’t going to rescue everyone. He will raise many, but many more will fall. It says in v35 that the child will reveal what is in people’s hearts, and they will be raised or will fall according to what is in their hearts concerning him. And as he does that work of dividing people who receive him from people who don’t, that work will take him to a cross, just as Isaiah prophecied, and Mary’s heart is going to get broken.

There is a consolation and there is a cost. The cost is that you have to cast yourself on this Jesus. You have to give him your heart. You have to want the consolation of God and be prepared to make him the Lord of your life. Going to church – that isn’t it. Singing hymns and praying on their own don’t make you a Christian. A Christian is someone who looks like Simeon and Anna – worshipping, praying, fasting, delighting in God’s rescue above all things

I pray that 2010 will see growing in us a spirit of being a worshipping people. A group who exult in him, who throw ourselves face down in wonder before him, who are led, like Simeon and Anna to pray and fast and long for God to act. Not this time in sending his redeemer, but for his redeeming work to come home here in Orpington, in power, for the salvation of many many people.