I have a question for you today. Have you ever gone to give someone a gift and you knew the gift that you were going to give? It was the best one. Like you thought about it. You had every list on Amazon, Target, Walmart, everything. You even went to the mall and went shopping for this gift. You knew it was going to be a great gift. And you knew when they got this Christmas gift, they were going to open it and they were going to look at you and say, Wow, you care so much. But have you ever given a gift like that that you thought someone was going to love just for them to open it and then they hit you with the, oh, you shouldn't have face. You know what I'm talking about. Now, this was how Aaron and I's marriage was for about the first three years of it, okay? During Christmas time, I would go to buy her something, and I would think, man, this is a great gift. Christmas morning, she'll open it, and she'll be like, oh, you really shouldn't have done that. And I was like, what? You know, so you go. Every year this would happen, and then by New Year's, all the gifts I got her were already back at the store. Okay. So I said, I finally said, you know what? I'm gonna do something. I'm gonna ask my friend, who's very stylish, I'm gonna say, hey, can you go out and buy Aaron Christmas gifts and say they're from me, okay? And so I gave her the money, said, go ahead and do it. Okay, that Christmas morning comes. Aaron opens the gifts and she says, Wow, how do you know me so well? These are amazing. So here you go. It wasn't an Aaron problem, it was a me problem. I was I wasn't a good Christmas gift giver. But here you go. Giving out Christmas gifts can have a lot of pressure. It can be you're trying to make it right. We are starting a brand new series today about three gifts that Jesus got, and they were kind of interesting. Like, what do they mean? They're kind of kind of mysterious gifts. And so we're gonna talk about what these gifts mean for back then and what they mean for us today. Well, we're starting this series called The Gift. Okay, so now if you don't know the story, Jesus was born in Bethlehem during the reign of King Herod, and some wise men, some wise men, or you might call them Magi, traveled a great distance to come worship Jesus. Now, how many wise men were there? How you know who in here has a nativity scene, or your grandma has a nativity scene, or you have that neighbor that has like the nativity scene in their yard with the sign that says the reason for the season? You know what I'm talking about. Uh you know, how many do you typically see? Three wise men, right? There's no there's normally always three of them. Now, we don't know for sure how many wise men were actually there. We tend to think there are three, but the chances are there's dozens, dozens of wise men and their caravan of people, a family, so it could have been hundreds of people that came to visit Jesus. And they and it wasn't baby Jesus in the manger. This would have happened a few years afterwards. So it was toddler Jesus that that they went that they came to visit. And so is potty training Jesus. Can we say that? I don't know. Okay, but um well, we don't know for sure, but you know, I think we assume three because he received three gifts. But what we do know about the wise men was this they were highly educated, they were incredibly wealthy, and they were desperate to meet the one who would be savior of the world. Matthew 2 says like this when they saw the star, they were filled with joy. They entered the house and saw the child with his mother, Mary, and they bowed down and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasure chests and gave him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Okay, I have to admit, when we had our three kids, nobody ever gave me gold. Never received that, never got frankincense, never got any myrrh, you know. Maybe I wanted some myrrh. Um, you know, you know, what in the world are those gifts? I don't know. When we had babies, people got us diapers, people got us onesies, people got us wet wipes, which were great, and then someone got us the gift, which is the best gift we ever got, and it was the baby snot sucker. This is the best gift ever. You know, you you just attach that to your mouth and you suck that snot right out that baby's nose. I still have Aaron do that to me today. That was a good gift. You should get it if you don't have it. But but but you know, I just didn't get any gold. That's all I'm trying to say. We didn't get gold, we didn't get frankincense, we didn't get myrrh. You know, so so some different kind of gifts that Mary and Joseph got. Wise men offered them three gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And these gifts were not only valuable, but they were actually incredibly practical, and yet they were very deeply spiritual, very spiritual. In fact, all Bible scholars agree that these three gifts not only were useful for the family, but they also foreshadowed some of the images of what Jesus would represent to the world. Gold representing is valuable in itself, representing the kingship of Jesus. Mr. represented Jesus as the suffering servant or the Lamb of God. And today we're going to talk about frankincense. Now, not to be confused with Frankenstein. When I was a kid, I was always like, Why does someone give Jesus Frankenstein for his birthday? I was already confused. Was that just me? It was just me. Okay. Now, but before I tell you the meaning of frankincense, let me tell you a little bit about it. Frankincense, in simple terms, is kind of like the Swiss Army knife of ancient oils. Okay? People used it to clean wounds, it helped with digestion, it calmed the body, even helped with pain. It was kind of basic an all-purpose um healing oil. So frankincense was very expensive, which for Mary and Joseph, that would, you know, who aren't wealthy, that would have been an amazing gift they they received. But it's also a practical gift that it would heal sicknesses or treat wounds. But more so, frankincense was the oil that the priests would use during the sacrifice to burn incense, which is kind of like the song we sung today. Would burn incense that would make smoke that would arise to heaven, symbolizing the prayers of the people rising in faith to God. So this is why Bible scholars agree that frankincense represents the priestliness of Jesus, the priesthood of Jesus. And I want to talk to you about what it means that Jesus is our high priest. Now, for some of you, if you if you're not raised in a Catholic upbringing or something like that, you're like, Jesus as our priest, what are you talking about? Like, I never knew that. You know, what does that mean? But what we see in scripture is that Jesus is the high priest. Now, now why would he be that? Why would he be that? What I want to do today, I want to get can I get a little deeper today? Is that all right? Can I get a little deeper? Okay, I want to get a little heady teaching, but I got some practical takeaways too, okay? Jesus as our high priest. In scripture, the priest had one main job. He had one main job that functioned in two ways, though, had two key functions. The priest would stand before God on behalf of the people. Now the priest would stand before God on behalf of the people and pray for the people. Now, I got to say something about this because here at the vineyard, we don't believe in the holy man. We don't believe that, oh, you gotta come here from me because I'm the only one that can speak to God. I believe you can speak to God. I believe you can go before God anytime, any place, anywhere, and he listens to you. I believe that God wants to have an intimate connection with you. I believe that so deeply that starting here to 20 to as we worked on our 2026 goal, our number one goal as a church is to help everyday people learn how to develop spiritual habits in their lives, daily spiritual habits in your lives. Because, because here's why, here's why. Because God, God, the God who made the heavens and the earth, the God who made the sea and everything in it, that same God wants to talk to you. That God wants an intimate connection, relationship with you, with you, and that's good news. That's good news. But back in the day, the priests will go before God on behalf of the people. And this whole idea was that the priest what would I represent you to God, and that was the primary function. The priest made sacrifices for the forgiveness of sins. And as a priest, he would take an innocent animal, sacrifice it to represent the forgiveness of sins, uh of people's sins, and then secondly, the priest prayed prayers on behalf of the people to God, representing the people to God. Now I want to break those two those two functions down a little bit as we look at Jesus as our high priest, the two big ones, the sacrifices and the prayers. All right. So let's start with the first one, the sacrifice of our sins. So the very moment in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve both sinned against God, there were two opposing forces. There was the holiness of God and the sinfulness of humankind. And they're at and they were at each other. Now, admittedly, in our culture today, we don't normally like to use the word sin. You know, people don't really like that word. People kind of get a little sketched out about that word. You know, you know, a lot of people say they don't even like the word sin. They say, hey, I make mistakes. I may even say, but hey, don't go put a sin label on it, you know. Who gets to decide what's right or wrong? You do what feels good to you, I do what feels good to me, your truth, my truth, you live your life, I'll live mine. Some people even say that sin is just an outdated idea, something invented to scare kids and to behaving well. So, in other words, who needs to use the word sin when you have an elf on the shelf that will report to Santa if your kids are behaving or not. You know, well, who needs sin? You got you got Alfie the elf. You know, so so so so uh you know, so who can tell, you know, here's the challenge though. Here's the challenge. We have to understand that the reality of sin. We have to understand it because it sets up one of the biggest truths of our faith. God is holy and we are sinful. And we are sinful. Now, if we don't understand the holiness of God, I want you to catch this. If we don't understand the holiness of God, we'll always have a casual approach to sin. If we don't if we don't understand that God is holy, we'll just say, oh, it's not that big of a deal. Ah, yeah, sure, I hurt a lot of people. Who cares? You know, that's how we will approach it. Until we understand what it truly means that God is holy, we'll never realize the cost and the tragedy of what sin does to us. God is holy. So, what does that actually mean? This Greek word for holy means to it means that God is separate. He is set apart. So, who is God? He is completely and totally set apart, he's above us, beyond us, unlike anyone or anything else. Our God is perfect in every single way. He is flawless, he is pure. There is no fault, no wrong, no stain in him. Our God is transcendently other, he's separate, he is perfect. And so we need to understand that the holiness isn't just one attribute of God. Holiness is the perfection of all of his attributes. His power is holy, his grace is holy, his mercy is holy, his glory is holy. It is his holiness, his separateness, his purity that makes them worthy of our praise. That's what makes them worthy of our praise, and not the holy man. See, oftentimes churches fall into the trap that they want to promote a senior leader. Oh, look how great I am. No, no, no, no, no. Here at LVC, I don't want to promote me, I want to promote Jesus. He's the holy one, he's the one worthy of our praise, and he's the one that wants to know you and have an intimate relationship with you. So, so none of us, not not one single one of you, not even your grandma. Hate to break it to you, is without sin. Whoa, what's it? Not even that nice person at work who brings in the cookies. You know, sin, sin breaks our intimacy with the Holy God. You know that's what sin really does. You know, you know, God's not just man, oh, those sinners. No, no, no, God is heartbroken because sin puts a wedge between the thing that he loves the most, and that's young. That's what that's why he doesn't like sin. That's why God hates sin. It's because it's everything he's not, it's the opposite of his holiness. It just disrupts intimacy, his fellowship with us. Sin separates us from God and breaks our life, it destroys our lives, and therefore God hates it. And the holiness of God and the sinfulness of God. So the high priest, the high priest, getting back to these high priest people in the Old Testament, one time a year would make a sacrifice, a temporary payment for the sins of the people. It was known as the Day of Atonement or Yah Yom Kippur. And the priest would sacrifice an innocent animal and go to the tabernacle behind the veil and to the place known as the Holy of Holies. Sounds like a good place. And then the priest then would light the frankincense, and then the incense would let smoke rise, burn into heaven, represents the cry of the people of God for mercy. Then the priest would take the blood of the innocent animal and sprinkle it on the mercy seat. It was a symbol that the innocent was dying in place of the guilty, and it was the payment for people's sins. Now, have you ever heard of the term scapegoat? Okay? The term scapegoat that actually comes from this moment in scripture. So the priest would then take another goat, an innocent goat, confess the sins of the people over it, symbolically placing their sins onto that goat. Then they was sending the goat out into the wilderness, never to be found, and probably falling over a cliff somewhere. And so this so this is so what you have was one animal that died as a sacrifice, paying for the sins, and the scapegoat that was driven away, showing that the people's sins has been removed and separated from the community. Now, may we pause for a moment and I can have everyone stand up to your chairs, and we're actually gonna do that in the back of the school. I'm joking, we're not really doing that. Some people got nervous. You're like, I knew it was one of those weird churches. They meet at a school. I knew they were weird. You know, we're not doing that. That would be a weird service to invite someone back to you. How was church for you, Sunday? Dude, goat blood. You know, that'd be weird. So, okay, we're not doing that. All right. Um, but imagine, imagine hearing this for the first time. You take an innocent, cute little animal, you sacrifice it, the blood drains into a bowl, the priest puts it on the mercy seat, and then everyone prays. You know, you're thinking this is a little weird. This is this is I don't understand it. It's extreme, it's kind of gross. And honestly, it feels what? Totally unfair. The innocent animal dying in our place? Who would ever come up with something like that? And here's what we have to understand God is just, completely just, which means he must, he must deal with sin. And I want you to give this not because he's angry at the sinners, he's angry that the sin separates him from his creation. So he has to deal with it. He has he has to he has to do. And I want you to know something that God, our father, is a God who father who deals with problems and doesn't run away from them. And I just feel prophetically, there's someone in here that you've had a father in your life who always ran away from problems, but your heavenly father doesn't run away from problems, he deals with problems and he makes a pathway in the problems. Okay, I feel like that was for someone in here today. Okay, but but um, but so we have to understand. So but God isn't just so God isn't only just, but he's also incredibly merciful. And this is where the beauty of God starts to show. The sacrifice satisfies God's justice and at the same time extends mercy. And so it's a price that is paid, that that, but someone else has to pay the price for the forgiveness of sins. So God's holiness, his justice is satisfied, and yet it extends mercy to the people that he loves so much. This was, this was a temporary covering honor the old covenant. But we are not people of the old covenant, we are not people of the old covenant. We're on it, we're honored the new covenant, and I want to tell you about a new and better sacrifice. Hebrews 10, verse 10 tells us a little bit about our great high priest. His name is Jesus, and he is the Son of God. Hebrews 10 says this for God's will was for us to be made holy by the sacrifice of the of the body of Jesus Christ once for all time. Honor the old covenant, the priest stands and ministers before the altar day after day, offering the same sacrifices again and again, which can never take away sins. But our high priest offered himself to God as a single sacrifice for sins, good for all time. Come on, that's some good news. That's some good news. It's not a temporary covering, but Jesus as a high priest offers his life, his innocent life as a covering for our sins, satisfying the justice of God and extending mercy to God's creation, who he loves. And now, one of the best ways, one of the best ways I can illustrate this point is this. It's a story. I got I got I gotta tell a story, okay? Now, now I I tell a story, and these are one of these stories that I'm always kind of like, okay, I'm gonna tell it, but I want you to hear what I'm trying to say. I'm not saying how awesome I am of this, but this is the opportunity that God gave me to do, me and Aaron to do for someone, okay? But let me let me tell you this story, okay? Okay, so when when um Aaron and I were youth pastors down in Virginia Beach, there was a girl in our youth ministry who didn't have much at all. She didn't have much at all. She came from a really tough upbringing, broken situation. Um, but honestly, she kept showing up to church. She just kept showing up, and and and we could see God all over her life. We knew that God was all over her. So we invested a lot of our time into her. We invested a lot of our time into her. We mentored her, spent time with her, and just tried to be kind of those steady voices of hope for her life. And it was working. She was getting a lot better and her schooling and stuff like that. Um, and then this one particular year, Christmas came around. Aaron and I, we were newly married at the time. We didn't we didn't have much money and stuff like that. But we found out that she was gonna be completely alone on Christmas. She's gonna be no celebration, no family. You know, her mom was going up to spend Christmas with her boyfriend and her grandma, all this different stuff. So she was gonna be by herself on Christmas. And so, no gifts, nothing. So we decided um she's not gonna spend Christmas like that. She's not gonna spend Christmas like that. So we went out and we bought her a handful of gifts, and you know, honestly, more than we can afford at the time. And then on Christmas Eve, we brought her to our house and we sat her by our our our tree, our big tree. We've always had big trees. Um, that's the Aaron thing. So and um, and we handed her her first present, and um, it was a new pair of shoes that she really wanted. And she she opened it, she's like, Oh, that's so sweet. You can see you can see that she was thankful for, and but she thought that was gonna be it. And then Aaron and I hand her another gift. She opens it, and then another gift, and then another gift, and another gift. And then another one, and basically, we gave her pretty much a new wardrobe in which each gift that she got, tears were going down her face because she thought she had no value, she thought she was worthless, and those gifts that we gave her represented to her that she was not alone, that she was not worthless, and that even more important, that God saw her, that God saw her and was with her, and was with her. And that's one of the best ways I can illustrate what it was like for Jesus. As God gave us the gift of Jesus, He looked at us and said, You're worth more than the shame that you carry, the guilt that you have, the loneliness and depression, the anxiety that you're dealing with. And what Jesus did, but on a cosmic scale, was He came when we we came to Him with nothing but our sin, our shame and our brokenness. And what did He do? He took our covering of sin, all the guilt, all the darkness, all the stuff we hide, and we and He placed His righteousness on us. He didn't just forgive us, He gave us a new wardrobe. He dressed us up in His righteousness. He dressed us up. He dressed us up so much. He clothed us with His Word, He covered us in His value, He wrapped us in His identity. And like that girl under our Christmas tree, Jesus keeps handing us gift after gift, grace after grace, mercy after mercy, forgiveness, belonging, purpose. Not because we've earned it, but because He wants us to see how much we are worth to Him. And that's the message of Christmas. A Savior who came to remove our sin. A Savior that came to remove the thing that was blocking us from intimacy with our Father God. He came because it had to be dealt with. Oh, it couldn't have been like, ah, you know, we'll worry about another day. It couldn't have been abandoned, rejected, or forgot about. It had to be dealt with. And so God, so God in his love for you, and God in his love for me, and God in his love for our community and our world said, I'm gonna send my one and only Son. I'm gonna send Jesus, a Savior who came to remove our sin and not just remove our sin, but to cover us with his righteousness. So we can finally see ourselves the way He sees us. Jesus, our high priest, sacrificed his life so we could take his robes of righteousness and be covered with his righteousness. It's not yours, it's not yours, but it's his. And here's the best part because whenever God looks at you, and whenever God looks at me, he doesn't see our mess, but he sees that we're covered by Jesus. He sees Jesus. You see Jesus in me. Like God, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't know the things I think about. You don't know the darkness in Jesus and God. He sees Jesus when he sees you. And it's beautiful. This is our high priest who gave his life, satisfying the justice of God and extending the mercy of God. Jesus, our high priest. And he's not just a distant savior that feels sorry for us. He is a high priest who understands and cares. Hebrews 4 says this so then, since we have a great high priest who has entered heaven, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold firmly to what we have believed. This high priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for he faced all the same testings we do, yet he did not sin. I hope you understand and embrace this truth that whatever you're going through in life, Jesus understands. He relates to our trials, he sympathizes with our pains. So whatever you're going through at this very moment, he understands what you're going through. If you feel stressed right now, well, there was a time where Jesus was in the garden, when his friends abandoned him, when he knew that the cross was coming and he fell to the ground and he said, My soul is overwhelmed with agony to the point of death. He understands anxiety and fear and doubt. So if you have dealt with it, he understands you. If you deal with crazy people in your family, Jesus dealt with crazy people in his family. It's a spiritual principle, you guys. Every family has crazy. Everyone does. And if you're saying, not my family, it's you. I'm joking. When Jesus said, I am the Messiah, his family said, You're a lunatic. Think about how much Jesus understands. So you can know how much he cares. Jesus was conceived out of wedlock to a teenage mom. Scandalous. He was raised in a small town where everyone whispered about him, calling him that bastard boy. Jesus lived in poverty. He was criticized. He was ridiculed, he was bullied and tempted by the devil again and again. And yet in his weakest moment, in his most vulnerable moment, he did not sin. Jesus experienced the death of a close friend. He grieved the loss of family members. He was accused of things he did not do. His friends betrayed him. Worst of all, he felt completely abandoned by God on the cross. Because when Jesus, the great high priest, became sin for us, the scapegoat, he gave his life for us. God had to look away. Why? Because God is too holy to look upon sin. And yet Jesus cried out in his agony, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And if you ever felt like you couldn't reach the presence of God, Jesus understands. Jesus understands it. Whatever you feel, he felt. Whatever you hurt, he hurt. He's your great high priest who sympathizes and understands. He's not sitting in heaven and going, sucks to be you. No, no, no. He is our high priest who has experienced all the pain of being a human, all the emotion of being rejected, all the agony of hurting, feeling alone and feeling abandoned. And imagine if you can the details of our God. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God. John 1 1 says, The word became flesh. God born in the form of a child who loves you, who cares about you. And God and his divine providence sent magic, wise men to offer gifts, prophetically declaring the nature of Jesus to come. Gold, he is our king. Myrrh, he is our suffering servant and lamb of God. Frankincense, he is our high priest, who will be sacrificed for the forgiveness of sins and praise prayers on our behalf to God in heaven. This is why scripture is so important when it says, come on, it says, so let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. And there we will receive his mercy and we will find grace to help us when we most need it. Because our high priest paved the way that we can go boldly before the throne of God, not with fear, not with not with anxiety, not with what is he gonna think about me, but we can go before him and find peace in his presence, love in his presence, grace in his presence, truth in his presence. We can go to our father. And here's the thing, here's the thing about going boldly to our father, my kids. I got three of them, I got three of them, my kids, my kids never come to me in King James language. Thou father, can thy play with me now? They never come to me that way, especially my baby, my baby Hayden. He never comes to me that way. He'll come right up to me. I'll be sitting on the couch, he'll jump on my lap and then jump on me and wrap his wrap his legs around me with his stink butt. Because their father, how much you get this? And I'm just I'm human, but their father is available. Friends, your heavenly father is always available to you. Always, always, always, always available to you. So the question really is this are you available to him? Because he paved the way so that we can be in relationship with him. So God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, we thank you. That you made a way. Move in might and move in power. Silence. Silence. That's why the Holy Spirit's saying. We're so busy. So many things run into our minds. And he says, silence. Find silence. Find a place to be with him. To be near him. I feel the word approachable. Like God is approachable. And if you ever felt like he wasn't, he wants to tear down that lie right now. He's approachable. That's like the word the Lord is saying now, he's enjoyable. He's actually fun to be around. So God, help us be around you. Help us spend daily time with you. We surrender the things that we keep running to that actually separate us from you. That's like the Holy Spirit is saying. Don't try to do behavior modifications. Just spend time with me. The behavior will work itself out. We love you, Jesus. We thank you, Jesus. And you are our great high priest. And we can go directly to you guys. So we say, here we are. Here I am. More of you. Lesson me. We love you in this place today. In Jesus' name. Amen. Come on, let's give God some praise in here.