If you will, let's turn in our
Bibles today to Luke chapter 2. We will begin our reading in
verse 39, Luke chapter 2. The first word is the word and. and as a connecting word. And
I would just remind us that last Sunday morning we looked at that
prophecy of Haggai where God foretold that the glory of the
second temple would be greater than the glory of the first temple. And it would be so because the
desire of all nations should come to this temple. And we saw
the first time the Lord Jesus Christ was brought to this temple
at about six weeks of age. Now, we begin, and when they
had performed all things according to the law of the Lord, they
returned into Galilee to their own city, Nazareth. And the child
grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace
of God was upon him. Now his parents went to Jerusalem
every year at the Feast of the Passover. And when he was 12
years old, they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the Feast.
And when they had fulfilled the days, as they returned, the child
Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem, and Joseph and his mother knew
not of it. But they, supposing him to have
been in the company when a day's journey, and they sought him
among their kinsfolk and acquaintance. And when they found him not,
they returned back again to Jerusalem seeking him. And it came to pass
that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in
the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them
questions. And all that heard him were astonished
at his understanding and answers. And when they saw him, they were
amazed. And his mother said unto him,
Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and
I have sought thee sorrowing. And he said unto them, How is
it that you sought me? Wished ye not that I must be
about my father's business? And they understood not the saying
which he spake unto them. And he went down with them and
came to Nazareth and was subject unto them. But his mother kept
all these sayings in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom
and stature and in favor with God and man. I'm convinced, as
I'm sure you are as well, that there's nothing unimportant in
God's word And there's nothing unimportant about the Lord Jesus
Christ especially. The incarnation, that is the
eternal Son of God being made flesh, contains mysteries that
only eternity shall unfold. His birth, his childhood, his
ministry, his death, his resurrection, and his ascension back into heaven
make up the things that Peter said even the angels desire to
look into. Great is the mystery of godliness. God was manifest in the flesh. We are told little about his
childhood, But I want us to look at this passage today that tells
us the most of his childhood. And I'm going to divide our thoughts
into three parts as we look at Luke's record of the childhood
of our Savior. First, his childhood home in
verses 39 through 41. When they had performed all things
according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee to
their own city, Nazareth. And the child grew and waxed
strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God
was upon him. Now his parents went to Jerusalem
every year at the feast of the Passover. His childhood home
was in the country of Galilee. The Jews had little use for the
people from Galilee. The general idea of the city
in which he raised, that is the city of Nazareth, we may learn
from Nathanael's question when he was told that they had found
the Messiah. And Nathanael said, can any good
thing come out of Nazareth? Nazareth, a city in Galilee. If you look at the map, you will
see that Galilee was up in the northern part of Israel. And it was, as I said, a part
of the country that was generally looked down upon by the elite,
by those in Jerusalem, by the center, by those in the center
of the religious worship. I believe that there's no doubt
fulfilled a prophecy of him in Isaiah 53 that said, for he shall
grow up before him. That is, he, Christ, shall grow
up before him, the father, as a tender plant and as a root
out of a dry ground. He hath no farm nor comeliness. And when we shall see him, there
is no beauty that we should desire him. In Nazareth, he grew up
before his God and Father as a tender plant. As this scripture
tells us, he grew in body and waxed strong in spirit, filled
with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him. You know that
when we read He was made flesh, the Word was made flesh, it means
that He took into union with His person. That is the eternal
Son of God took into union with His person, man. Man when created was created
body and soul. And the Lord Jesus Christ as
man, as the God-man, He too has a body, had a body, has a body. and also a human spirit. Now, I said his childhood home. The adults in this home, the
adults that we know of who were in this home, his mother Mary
and his supposed father. And I use that word supposed
because if you look in the next chapter, chapter 3 and verse
23 in this genealogy, It says, And Jesus himself began
to be about thirty years of age, being as was supposed the son
of Joseph. In other words, as he was raised
in the home where Mary his mother lived and her husband Joseph,
people around supposed that Joseph was his father, his human father. But you and I know Joseph was
not his father. He was born of the Virgin Mary. His Father, and thank God His
Father, is God the Father. When He spoke to Mary after His
resurrection, He said, I return unto My Father and Your Father,
unto My God and Your God. He has always been the Father
of the Eternal Son, but when He came into this world as a
man, God became His God. And that's important for us to
remember. He came as the servant of Jehovah. But because He came, now we may
know God as our Father and as our God. That was one of the
great promises of the New Covenant, isn't it? I will be your God. And when God is your God, you
can want nothing. You understand what I mean? When
God, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, when He is our God and
our Father, we could want nothing. And it's all through Him coming
into this world, being made flesh. So the two adults in this home,
Mary, his mother, and his supposed father, we learn something about
them from verse 41. We learn that they obeyed the
Lord. They worshiped the Lord. In verse
41 it says, Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the
feast of the Passover. The law of the Lord, the law
of Moses, required that every year all the males, now that's
important I think, all the males had to go to Jerusalem three
times each year. There were three feasts that
they had to attend. The first feast that came along
was this feast that is mentioned here, the Feast of Passover. Now, the Feast of Passover and
the Feast of Unleavened Bread were connected together and lasted
seven days or eight days, maybe. These feasts, as you think about
them, they were times, or they were intended at least to be
times, first of all, of worship. They went up to Jerusalem to
worship, to worship God, because that was the place where He had
put His name. That was a place where the mercy
seat resided. That was a place where God said
that He would meet with them. So first of all, to these feasts
they went to Jerusalem to worship, but also to fellowship. That
is to fellowship with other of like minds, of like faiths. They went up to fellowship with
them. And also these times of, these
feast times, they were times of joy. You see, the worship
of our God is a joyful time. Come into His presence with thanksgiving,
the scripture says. With joy we come together. It was a time of worship, a time
of fellowship, a time of joy, and certainly it was a time of
thanksgiving. And especially this feast, this
Feast of Passover, was a time of thanksgiving because The greatest
deliverance, the greatest picture of salvation in the Old Testament
had to do with the Passover, didn't it? Here these Israelites
were slaves, and they'd been slaves for some time. They had
no way to rescue themselves out of slavery. And God sent a prophet. He sent Moses there. Moses had
a message from God. You take a lamb, every family
take a lamb and you keep that lamb up for four days to examine
it and make sure that it has no blemishes, it has no spots,
it's not deformed in any way. Why? Because that lamb represents
my lamb. You look at that lamb and then
on that 14th day of the month, You slay that lamb, and you catch
the blood of that lamb in a basin, and you take hyssop, and with
that hyssop you go back to your house and you sprinkle the doorpost
and the lintel of that house, and you go in, and you stay in. Don't you come out, because I'm
going to pass over Egypt tonight. And when I pass over Egypt, all
the firstborn who are not under the blood, are going to be slain
and then you are going to be delivered. You're going to go
out of Egypt. Pharaoh and all of the Egyptians,
they're going to desire that you leave. What a picture of
redemption, of how we are delivered. That's what salvation is, isn't
it? It's deliverance. Deliverance from sin, from the
power of sin. from the penalty of sin, and
yes, thank God, one day from the very presence of sin. Saved,
delivered, and how? By blood. By the death of that
Lamb, which pictured the blood and death of the Lord Jesus Christ. They went up. Every year, the
Scripture says. Mary didn't have to go up. That's
what I wanted to bring out. Joseph was commanded to go up.
Mary went up. Those feasts were like our worship
services. Our worship service here today
should be a time of worship and of fellowship and of joy and
of thanksgiving. What a blessing it is. No one
holds a gun to our head and makes us come. We come, those of us
who know Christ, we come because we love Christ and we love to
hear of Him. Tell me the old, old story like
you said a little while ago. There's only one gospel. And
it never grows old. Hearing the message of Christ
never grows old because it feeds us. It comforts us. It assures
us. It blesses us. It fills us with
joy to hear about Christ and His wonderful work in our place
and in our state. What a happy home this was. His
childhood home. I say it was a happy home because
it was a holy home. where both husband and wife,
and the scripture says, how can two walk together lest they be
agreed? And both Mary and Joseph were
agreed in worshiping the Lord, in serving the Lord, in honoring
the Lord. His home, his childhood home,
was a happy home, a holy home. What a blessing to children who
are raised in such a home, but many are not. But God's grace
reaches down even to those that were raised in a home that was
everything but a holy home, a happy home, and calls out his people. Second, his childhood work. So his childhood home, Mary and
Joseph, they served the Lord, they honored the Lord, a happy
home in which he was raised. His childhood work, he tells
us of his childhood work in verse 49 when he answered Mary's question. Wish ye not that I must be about
my father's business? You see, his childhood work at
the age of 12, at the age of 14, at every age, it was always
true of him. His childhood work was the business
of his father. That's the reason he came. He
came on business. He came on an errand. He came
sent. His work as a childhood was the
work of his father. Now, when they would go to these
feasts, and you look at a map after the service is over, Turn
back in your Bibles and look at the map of Palestine. And you'll see where Nazareth
was, and you'll see where Jerusalem is. That was a long journey. And so they would go up to these
feasts in what we call caravans. It might start, it may have started
in Nazareth. His kin folks and others there
of Nazareth, or it may have started even farther off, farther north.
And as they come down on their way, more people join in. And it was a time of joy because
they would sing as they went along. It was a dangerous journey,
I might say that too. It was an arduous journey to
travel. They didn't have one of these
super trains or anything like that. Walking, maybe some riding
on donkeys, but it was a hard journey, but they went. But it
was a time of joy. Several of the psalms were sung
as they went along from what we know from history. It was
a time of visiting with kinfolks maybe they hadn't seen, acquaintances
and people from other villages and towns. This time, when he
was 12 years of age, Now the scripture says it went up every
year, but this time we have this recorded. That when Mary and
Joseph gathered up their things, after the days were fulfilled,
they were there the whole time of the feast. But when the time
ended, they gathered up their things and they started for home. Now I believe, think about this,
I believe it was only natural because He had been in their
home for 12 years. Remember, He was sinless. Remember,
He was here to obey the law in our stead. And part of that law
is honor thy father and thy mother. He had always done that. He always
did that. I think it would be only natural.
They assumed when they got things together, He had learned by past
experience when the feast was over. They went home. For them
to assume, that's what the Scripture says, they assumed that He was
in their company. And when they finished the first
day of their journey, they realized that He was not with them. Now
I understand that the times and the environment was much different
from ours. one of your children rather went
missing for a day, you'd have an alert. But I'm sure even for
them, it was an anxious time. And maybe even they had thought
that they were guilty of not watching after him and making
sure of him. I think this may have been part
of what Simeon had told Mary, that her soul would be pierced
through with many a sword. This was just the beginning.
Of course, the greatest was when she came to the cross and looked
up and saw her son upon the tree, suffering and dying for sinners. I wonder if they did not reproach
themselves for being neglectful. As I thought about this, I thought,
well, was He, was the Lord Jesus Christ allowing them, allowing
them to experience this sorrow? To teach them, or at least to
remind them, that He could live without them. Remember, as God,
He commanded the ravens to feed one prophet. And He was still
God at 12 years of age. He was God from the beginning.
Always God. Was He teaching them or reminding
them that He could live without them? You know, that's such an
important lesson, isn't it? For men to hear and learn. God
doesn't need us, but we sure need Him. We sure need Him. Maybe he was teaching them that.
It was not out of necessity. It was not out of necessity for
him to allow himself to be dependent upon their care. But here is
a lesson for you and I. Haven't we all experienced something
similar? None ever loved the Lord Jesus,
not even Mary. who has not experienced something
like this. We enjoy His presence, and then
we become distracted, get busy with other things to the neglect
of Him, only to discover that He's not in our presence. Now
I realize that as a child of God, we are never out of His
presence. He has promised that He is with
us always, even unto the end of the age. We can never lose
His presence, but we do lose His awareness. Or the awareness,
rather, of His presence. What are we to do? We're to follow
Mary and Joseph in their lead here. We're to seek for Him,
and we are to seek for Him where we lost Him. Did we lose Him in the lack of
prayer? Is that where we lost the sense
of His presence because we've neglected prayer? Did we lose Him in the sense
of neglecting His Word? We haven't read His Word like
we normally do and like we should? Did we lose Him there, the sense
of His presence by neglecting to read His Word? Or in the worship
service, neglecting the worship services? Is that how we've lost
a sense of His presence? Well, seek Him, as that proverb
is, seek Him where you lost Him. That's where you'll find Him.
Now it was a day's journey back. They'd gone one day away from
Jerusalem, there's a second day on coming back, and then they
found Him on the third day. And isn't it significant to us
that it was on the third day that they found him. For the
time that he had been out of their presence, they had been
filled with sorrow, just like the disciples. Remember, he told
his disciples several times that he was going to suffer and he
was going to die, but on the third day he would rise from
the grave. And when he died, his disciples,
they were filled with sorrow. But then on the third day, the
message came. He's alive. He's alive. We've seen him, and he appeared
unto them. You know, the gospel is good
news, isn't it? I was thinking, I was reading
this past week about Joseph down in Egypt, you know. His brother
sold him, and it was all providential, wasn't it? And he became the
Lord over all of Egypt. And when he revealed himself
to his brothers, he told them, he sent them back to get Jacob,
but he told them, see that you don't fall out on the way. And
he gave them all the provisions they would need for the journey.
But I thought, as those 11 brothers made their way back to Jacob,
don't you know that there was a There was a desire to get back
to Jacob. They had good news. Their father
Jacob assumed that Joseph had been dead all of these years.
And they saw that he wasn't dead, he's alive. And so they make
their way back to Jacob with good news. They couldn't wait
to get home to tell their father, our brother Joseph, he's not
dead, he's alive. He's ruler over all of Egypt. And isn't that the message we
have? That our elder brother, The Lord Jesus Christ, he's not
dead. Yes, he died on the cross, but
he did not stay dead. He's alive. And not only is he
alive, but he's a ruler over all this world. Everything is
under his hand. The gospel is good news. Well,
Mary and Joseph, they found him on the third day. And they found
him in the temple, the Scripture says, both hearing and asking
these learned doctors, these rabbis, questions. Think about
this. He who, as God, had given all
of these men what wisdom they had, now as a man listened to
their wisdom. And I think when it says he asked
questions, it certainly wasn't for information. He asked questions,
no doubt, to provoke thought on their part. Maybe ask this
question. What was this feast all about? This feast of the Passover. What
was this about? We've just been here for seven
days for this feast. What's this feast all about?
About a lamb. About bloodshed. About deliverance. What is this about? Doesn't it
picture the Lamb of God who is to come? The Apostle Paul, of
course, later tells us that Christ, our Passover, is sacrifice for
us. Well, the Bible here says that
the rabbis, they were astonished. They were astonished at his questions. They were astonished because
they looked at him as a 12-year-old boy. They didn't understand who he
was. And they were astonished. But
both Mary and Joseph, they were amazed. The doctors were astonished. Mary and Joseph, they were amazed. But only Mary spoke. And I think that indicates to us that Joseph,
he knew. This was not his son. The angel
told him that in the very beginning, didn't he? So Mary takes the
lead, and she speaks. And I believe she speaks more
out of grief. You could read it where maybe
it sounds like she was trying to reprimand him. But remember
now the anxiety that she must have felt. And so she asks, or
she makes this statement, thy father, and I have sought thee
sorrowing.' And we see in his answer that she had not considered,
she had not considered that some higher call was upon him. Yes, as a child he was obedient
to Mary and Joseph, honored them as the scriptures commanded,
but he had a higher calling. And that was to be obedient unto
God. Before that command to honor
thy father and thy mother is given, it is thou shalt have
no other God before me. This was his God. I must wish
you not, how is it that you've sought me? Don't you remember
who I am? How is it that you've sought
me? Wish ye not... Now notice, I must be about my
father's business. I looked in the Gospel of John
at the various times that we see this word must, where he
used the word must. The first time was when he was
speaking to Nicodemus and he said, even as Moses lifted up
the serpent in the wilderness, Even so must the Son of Man be
lifted up. And then in John chapter 10,
he said, other sheep I have which are not of this folk, them also
I must bring. John 4, he must needs go through
Samaria. And in John 20, he must rise
from the dead. I must be about my father's work. I thought maybe in Isaiah 42,
if you want to turn back here with me just a moment, this might
very briefly show us his father's work. I must be about my father's
work. I'm so glad he was about his
father's work, aren't you? Because his father's work was
the salvation of his people. In Isaiah 42 and verse 21, and
this is all about the servant of Jehovah, this chapter. It
says, the Lord is well pleased for his righteousness sake. He
will magnify the law and make it honorable. That was his father's
work, to magnify the law and to make it honorable. How did
he do that? In several ways. First of all,
by becoming subject to this law, he honored the law. By keeping
the law, he honored the law. By suffering at the hands of
the law, He honored the law. He made it honorable. And the
wonderful thing is he did that for all of his people. He did
that for each and every one of us who trust, who believe in
him. So his childhood home, it was
a happy home. His childhood work, it was the
father's business. And third, His childhood passing
into adulthood in the last two verses of this chapter. It says, And he went down with
them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them. But his
mother kept all these sayings in her heart. That's the second
time we're told that she did that. That tells us that we are not
only to hear, but we're to keep what we hear in our hearts. Muse
upon, think upon it. She kept all these sayings in
her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom
and stature and in favor with God and man. He, as a man, now
remember, as a man, He increased in wisdom and stature, just as
He His body increased in size and stature, so his mind, his
soul, increased in wisdom as a man. And this is the one that
the Apostle Paul tells us, that in him are hid all the treasures
of wisdom and knowledge. And yet as man, he increased
in wisdom, just as he increased in stature. As I said at the
beginning, the incarnation, God becoming flesh, throughout eternity we will learn
more and more of this mystery. How it is that he is perfect
God and perfect man in one person. And he had to be. He had to be
to be our Savior. And He is. Oh, what a Savior. What a Savior. A Savior who could
bleed and yet that blood have the power because He is also
God to cleanse and wash sinners. White as snow. White as snow. We're going to sing that hymn,
What Can Wash Away My Sins? Nothing But the Blood of Jesus. 232.