Perhaps you have heard the saying, a watershed moment. The idea of a watershed actually comes from geography. It means the high ground, like a hill or a mountain, that divides rainfall so that the water’s flow comes down either side. However, the way we use the term watershed is to describe life changing historical events. When the printing press was first invented in the fifteenth century, it was a watershed moment. When Christopher Columbus sailed the seven seas, when Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb, when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, these were watershed moments.

These verses of Scripture that I have just read to you describe a watershed moment. While the examples I gave, like Edison’s light bulb, describe the results of man’s work in history, the watershed described here, in contrast, is one of God’s work in history. This is what Christmas is all about. Here is a moment when God acted in human history like never before.

The watershed of Christmas, the birth of Christ, is a matchless miracle of God. Christmas was our Creator’s greatest gift and the display of his remarkable love for the world that he made and the people in it. Such a claim is disputed by those who do not know God, and many scoff at the idea that there is a Creator, let alone a Creator who acts in his world and interacts with his people. The truth of the matter is that we are occupants of a world that belongs to God. So why should we be surprised that he is at work in it?

The miracle we are talking about here is God’s incarnation. Deity assumed humanity. That is what we remember at Christmas, and that is in the person of the one we call the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. This watershed moment is the miracle that our infinite, most glorious and majestic, all powerful God, who spoke all that is into existence, has taken on that which he was not, that is flesh, and has come into this world as a man.

That is who Christians believe Jesus is. It is what we believe Christmas is all about, God coming to this world as a man to save man. What an event Christmas really is, a moment without compare. C. S. Lewis said, "The central miracle asserted by Christians is the incarnation. They say that God became man." The preacher Charles Spurgeon said, "The birth of Jesus is the grandest light of history, the sun in the heavens of all time."

God’s Timing

Let us move into the passage together. First, we want to consider what the text has to say about God’s timing of Christmas. The text reads, "But when the fullness of time came." This is a way of saying the perfect time, or just at the right time. It is like the passing of the seasons.

At some point next year in autumn, you will go to bed one night and wake up and say, there is a real cold snap in the air. It really feels like winter now. The fullness of time has come; the seasons have changed. So the Bible teaches it is with respect to the birth of Jesus Christ. This birth was an event that occurred not a day too late or a day too soon, but just on time, just as God had ordained.

God is the grand weaver of history. He holds the times and seasons in his hands. We cannot hold on to much; everything seems to fall through our hands. But it is not so with God. The Bible presents the reality that the coming of Jesus Christ was like a master painter adding the main character to the scene. First, the backdrop had to be painted in, and now finally the time had come to add the subject, the reason for it all, the Lord Jesus Christ.

We must ask the question, in what way did Jesus come in the fullness of time? Two obvious answers stand out. First, because Jesus’ birth was prophetic. In fact, the birth of Jesus was foretold in the Bible before the first human couple even had their own children. This child was promised. God promised that a special man would one day come as the divine answer to humanity’s greatest need, salvation and rescue from our estrangement from God because of sin. It was the fullness of time because it was prophetic time.

In Isaiah 7:14 it says, "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign; behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call his name Emmanuel," meaning God with us.

The second reason is due to the world conditions at the time of Jesus’ birth. When Jesus was born in Israel, this was the beginning of a time called the Pax Romana, a two hundred year so called golden age (so called) of the Roman Empire’s influence. It would be a time of shared language, culture, currency, and trade the world had not known before. The Roman Caesars could never have anticipated that their great world empire would be God’s vessel for the transmission of the message of Jesus Christ into all the world, via Roman roads and the Roman tongue, of a Saviour who was crucified on a Roman cross, the King of the Jews and the Saviour of the world. So in the fullness of time, he came.

God’s Initiative

The second point we see here is that the birth of Jesus Christ was a work of God’s initiative. The next clause says, "God sent forth his Son." The other day I received a package in the mail all the way from Temu in China. It arrived because I had ordered it. I went onto the internet, found what I wanted, and it was ordered and paid for. It arrived because of what we had done.

But when we speak of the birth of Jesus, we find that this was not something of human initiative at all. God’s work of salvation is about his moving towards us, not we towards him. From the beginning, since the fall of mankind into sin and death, God made promises of salvation, and he has acted upon them. God demonstrates his initiative in the birth of Jesus.

We see this in the nature of Jesus’ conception. This was a supernatural work, not of man. The angel said to Joseph, "Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins."

At Christmas we remember that the Creator has moved towards us. He has condescended to us. Many deny the reality that the Creator has moved in our world. Some hold the view that if there is a God in heaven, he surely does not want anything to do with us. Look at the state of the world, they say, the evil, the chaos, the wreck and havoc that man has made. But the Christian message speaks directly to this objection. God’s initiative deals with the root cause of human evil, suffering, and death.

It is a poor doctor who treats symptoms while knowing the root cause of a disease. God has come to deal with the underlying cause of our predicament. He came to save us from our sins. God has moved, and he shows us an open door, the way to himself and the heavenly world to come, all through the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

He did not watch our ruined condition with indifference or distance. From the beginning he was working to save our souls from eternal ruin by putting before us a substitute. The divine initiative involves the sending of his Son. This means that the triune Godhead, Father, Son, and Spirit, counselled for the person of the Son to incarnate. In this way, Jesus is God, sent of God. Or light from light, as the old creed says.

The mind cannot fully comprehend such a reality, but this is God we are speaking of. No matter how much we look into space, the awe in our hearts for what God has made remains. So it is with the birth of this child Jesus. We do not fully understand him, but we can see his beauty and know that he understands us, that his love for us is great, and that he came of his own volition and love for a people who were without hope.

The one who formed the womb and knitted us together in our mothers did so for himself, creating a womb for himself in Mary. He took on a human nature and a body. He who spread the starry host into its place, he who commanded the oceans, "This far and no further," has come to be born, and that for us.

Here is the great mystery of mysteries. Hebrews 2:14 says, "Since the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise also partook of the same."

God’s Plan

Our third point brings us to the heart of the Christmas story. We now see exactly why Jesus came. We have looked at God’s timing and God’s initiative, and now we see God’s plan. The text says, "Born under the law, so that he might redeem those who were under the law."

Whatever could be meant by the saying, born under the law? What an unusual thing to say. Does it mean that Jesus was born into a country that had the rule of law governing? Are we not all born in this way?

Well, first we have to ask, in what way are we under the law, as the text says? You see, the Bible teaches us that just as human societies have law, so does God. God has his commandments for mankind. This law he first writes on our consciences. We know by nature that it is wrong to lie, cheat, to steal, and all the rest. He has put his law in the conscience.

This law he also wrote down for his people in his word, the Bible. God’s law reflects God’s perfect moral standard, a standard to which we are all held accountable; to break God’s law is to sin. And Adam and Eve at the beginning, when they broke the law, and we, their descendants, have kept on in their likeness. We have kept on sinning.

But sin cannot be tolerated by a holy God, you see. Because he is good, because he is just, because he is holy, he must punish the sinner. God is so pure and so holy. You see, if next week I went into the Woodlands butcher and robbed them at gunpoint, I would be held accountable before the law for my crimes. And so too, because we are in God’s world, we are accountable to God’s laws.

The Bible says in Romans 3:23, "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." So we are in quite a predicament. We are born under the law, and the law has its grip on us, its hold on us, but we are transgressors of that law. We do not measure up.

But you see, Jesus came to redeem us, and the text tells us just that. To redeem carries the idea of buying back, to pay a ransom, and this is what Jesus has come to do. I will illustrate it with a story of the nineteenth century slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Frederick was not born a free man like you and I, but he was born a slave. He had a hard life and eventually fled from one of his masters in the United States. And he wrote a letter to his master saying this, "I love you, but I hate slavery." Frederick made his way to Britain, and in Britain he found some people who were actually willing to pay his old master in the United States for legal freedom; that is, they wanted to redeem him and to purchase him out of the slavery that he was in in the United States.

And so the bond was paid, the accounts were settled, and Frederick’s release was secured. He would then return to the United States and contribute to society, no longer as a slave, but now as a free man, for the ransom had been paid.

And friends, tonight I want you to know that this is Jesus’ work. It is why he has come, for the work of ransoming, for redeeming, is what Christmas is all about. And look at what he has done by being born as a man. It means that he too was born under that same law of God. Though he was the lawgiver, he made himself accountable as a man to his own law. Just as those people in Britain paid money to free Frederick, so too the currency that Christ has for our release from slavery to sin is his own perfect, sinless, spotless life. He never broke the law. No sin.

The law could find no fault in the Lord Jesus Christ. You see, he had to be the perfect man to represent us. He had to merit perfection before that law because you and I could not. And then his perfect life, you see, prepared him for the next part of his work, to shed his blood for us; in other words, that he would be judged in our place, a life for a life.

And he died in order that we might live, in order that we who are under the law, condemned by the law, might be freed from its power over us. We crucified, you see, the perfect man, but all was of God’s doing, because he died on the cross for us, in our place. So in his life, he earned the believer’s place to enter heaven, and by his death on the cross he paid the price for sins committed. He was judged there as a man in the place of his people. That was God’s plan.

God’s Gift

And finally, we want to look at God’s gift. The outcome of Jesus’ work of redemption is found in the final clause. Look again at verse five, so that we might receive the adoption as sons. God’s purpose in sending the Son into the world was so that, despite bondage to sin, he might instead give us the gift of adoption as sons. This is the good news of Christmas.

This is God’s work to save a people fit and ready for the glories of the new heavens and new earth to come. And so the glorious joy of Christmas is not only that we have a saviour who redeems us from sin and the law; it is also that he adopts us, a welcoming embrace as a father for sons and daughters. And he will live in us and through us, and he sets eternity in our hearts to cause us to long to know him and to love him, to trust him, to seek him, to worship him.

Come to Jesus in repentance for your sins, and in faith believe in him. Believe that he is the Son of God, sent to be your saviour, and you can know this hope too. In Christ, you can have an entirely new identity, a new purpose, a new hope, a new future. And it is all wrapped up in the one who was first laid to rest in this manger in Bethlehem.

Christmas therefore holds out a great invitation to you all tonight. The message is that though you are enslaved to sin and under condemnation according to God’s law, there is a God who loves to save sinners. There is a saviour provided for you tonight. He is your only way, not only to escape the wrath of God, but to meet the Creator’s warm embrace of sonship.

And you cannot free yourself. Only Christ has the resources. Only Christ has the power to save you. And so you need no longer live in fear of God. You need not retreat from him or think that there is no mercy in him. There is a great fountain of love that was poured out from God at Christmas, and it cannot run dry. It will only give and give and give more.

Do you know Christ this evening? Do you realise the sorry state of your soul without him, that to live Christless in this life is to go Christless into the next, when the consequences of your sin shall result in your eternal destruction? The child of Christmas, however, has not first come to judge, but to save; not to damn, but to be damned himself; to be crushed by the Father for you, to be made a curse for us.

Will you not repent and call out to God this evening for forgiveness and believe upon this Son? Only then can you call upon God as your Father. Only then can you receive the promise of eternal life. So how do you describe your encounter with God this Christmas? Is it a watershed moment, or is it just another day without change and without hope?