From the Pastor – December 2025
And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased.”—Luke 2:10-14
Glory to God in the highest, for He has brought salvation to His people. Glory to God in the highest, for He has fulfilled his promise. Glory to God in the highest for He has brought peace to the earth. Glory to God in the highest, He has sent us a Savior.
But this is no ordinary Savior. It is not one that you would expect with sword and shield, with power and might, with brawn and boldness. It is nothing like the angels that shine in majesty and cause men to fall on their faces. It isn’t like the hosts of heaven which could destroy the earth and every enemy therein without breaking a sweat. … No, this Savior has none of that glory; none of the glory that makes you tremble with fear, none of the glory that surely makes the shepherds drop to their knees in subjection and hide their faces from the glorious sight they see. … The glory of God is to be found in a stable; a smelly, animal-infested, barn. It is to be found wrapped in simple linen and placed in a trough where cows and goats and donkeys eat. It is to be found in the arms of a teenage girl while an overwhelmed carpenter struggles mightily to provide any sort of comfort he can to his bride amongst the filth of that stall.
The angels tell the shepherds, “Go to Bethlehem and find a stable. Go there and seek out a dumbstruck virgin mother and an equally overwhelmed lowly father; their faces locked somewhere between joy and terror like only the faces of new parents can be. Go and find this scene, this sign, and tell them what you have seen and heard. Tell them who you know this child to be. And then go and tell everyone you meet. Glorify God and praise His name because He has now brought peace to the earth and it is for all people!”
And this peace is something new. It’s not a peace that you would expect, not a peace that a mighty king and his army can bring. It isn’t even a peace that can even really be seen or noticed here on earth with human eyes and ears. It is a peace beyond all of that, beyond the understanding of our feeble and sinful little minds. It is a peace that only God can bring because it is a peace between God and man.
This type of peace you would expect would be brought through the glories of heaven, through pomp and circumstance and bright lights and trumpets blaring. You would expect that this sort of peace would be brought by a mighty man of God, who is unmistakable in sight and appearance. … But it isn’t. If the shepherds had not been told what to look for, they would have never found it, never even known to look for it. They would have gone their entire lives without ever knowing anything about it because it is a peace that is so backwards and crazy, so unimaginable and lowly, so humble and simple that it seems to be nothing at all. … But it is everything!
“You will find a child, yes a child. Nothing more than that. Just a simple child in a simple stable with simple clothes and simple parents. He will look nothing like the glories of heaven because He has laid all that aside. Instead, He is just like you, just like your little ones, just like every other baby that has ever been born, that has ever cried out in hunger, that has ever soiled a diaper. … Here is the glory of heaven all wrapped up in the flesh of mankind.”
God’s glory is now nothing like it should be. We may want to find it angel choirs and wondrous visions. But those glories our hidden from the eyes of sinful men. They must be, because a sinner can’t see them, not if he wants to go on living. For sin separates us from God. In fact, it makes us enemies of Him, brings us to war with Him. And this is a war that we can never win, never come out victorious, never end up on the right side of, not while we are still sinners. … And so God brings His glory to us in the simplest of ways: A child.
Simple beginnings and a simple end. Naked, except for a few stripes of linen at His birth. Naked except for a few stripes of linen at His death. Laid in a wooden manger. Nailed to a wooden cross. Crying out like a newborn baby. Crying out like a man being tortured to death. Sweat and blood and filth of a birth. Sweat and blood and filth of a crucifixion. Here is the glories of heaven now in the unlikeliest of places: a stable in Bethlehem and a hill outside of Jerusalem. … This is Christmas, and it is nothing without Good Friday. The birth we celebrate this December we do so only because of the death we celebrate in April. It is a new sort of glory that brings about the only sort of peace that matters: peace between God and man.
What We Believe—The Power and Primacy of the Pope (Paragraphs 49-59)
The Marks of the Antichrist
To these errors, two great sins are added: (a) The pope defends these errors by unjust cruelty and the death penalty. (B) He robs the decision away from the Church and does not permit religious controversies to be judged in the right way. Indeed, he argues that he is above the council and can rescind the decrees of councils. Church law sometimes shamelessly says this. But the evidence shows that the poet act even more shamelessly:
Question 9 canon 3, [of Gratian’s Second Decretal] says: No one shall judge the main [the pope’s] throne. For the judge is judged neither by the emperor, nor by all the clergy, nor by the kings, nor by the people.
The pope exercises a twofold tyranny: (a) He defends his errors by force and by murders, and (b) he forbids judicial examination. The latter does even more harm than any executions. When the true judgement of the Church is removed, godless dogmas and godless services cannot be removed. They destroy countless souls for many ages.
Therefore, let the godly consider the great errors of the kingdom of the pope and his tyranny. Let them ponder, (a) that the errors must be rejected and the true doctrine embraced, for the glory of God and the salvation of souls. The (b) let them ponder also how great a crime it is to aid unjust cruelty in killing saints, whose blood God will undoubtedly avenge (Revelation 6:10).
Even if the pope holds councils, how can the Church be healed if he allows nothing to be decreed against his will? Or if he allows no one to express an opinion except his followers, whom he has bound by dreadful oaths and curses to defend his tyranny and impiety without leaving any place for God’s Word?
The decisions of councils are the decisions of the Church, and not of the popes. So it is especially dependent upon kings to restrain the excesses of the popes. Kings must act so that the power of judging and decreeing from God’s Word is not snatched away from the Church. As the rest of the Christians must condemn all other errors of the pope, so they must also rebuke the pope when he avoids and hinders the true investigation and true decision of the Church.
Therefore, even if the bishop of Rome did have the primacy by divine right, since he defends godless service and doctrine conflicting with the Gospel, obedience is not due him. Indeed, it is necessary to resist him as Antichrist. The pope’s errors are clear, and they are not small.
There cruelty he exercises <against godly Christians> is also clear. God clearly commands us to flee idolatry [1 Corinthians 10:14], godless doctrine [1 Timothy 6:3-4], and unjust cruelty [Proverbs 11:17]. On this account, all the godly have great, compelling, and clear reasons for not obeying the pope. These compelling reasons comfort the godly against all reproaches usually cast against them about causing offenses, schism, and discord.
Those who agree with the pope and defend his doctrine and ,false. Worship [Gottesdienst] defile themselves with idolatry and blasphemous opinions. They become guilty of the blood of the godly, whom the pope persecutes [see Acts 9:1, 4-5; 1 Corinthians 11:27]. They detract from God’s glory and hinder the Church’s welfare because they confirm errors and crimes through all generations.
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Join Us For Bible Study and Sunday School
Sunday: Adult Bible Study (Romans) and Children’s Sunday School—8:45am
Tuesday: Adult Bible study (Ecclesiastes)—10:00am
For Further Personal Study
That Hideous Strength (Book 3 of “The Space Trilogy”)—C. S. Lewis
In the concluding book of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, the dark forces that were repulsed in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra are posed to invade Earth, while a rumor circulates that the ancient wizard Merlin is returning and offering tremendous power to those who can find and control him. The heroic Dr. Ransom is trying to handle these threats, while battling a sinister technocratic organization, by applying age-old wisdom to a new universe dominated by science. These groups struggle to a climatic resolution that brings The Space Trilogy to a magnificent, crashing close.
