The Promise of Light

Luke 1:26-38 · 2025-12-02 · Jason Wolin · The Light of Christmas

Luke 1:26-38 · Hope. The Promise of Light — sermon from Cypress Bible Church on BibleSlides.

The Promise of Light Slideshow for this message PDF Message Download Welcome to Christmas Cypress Bible Church! It’s Christmas time and for advent this year we are doing a four-part series entitled the Light of Christmas. Why that name? It certainly fits in terms of the aesthetic, but that’s not at all what we are after. There’s some pretty heavyweight industrial strength meaning behind the concepts of light and darkness in the Bible. Maybe it’s obvious, but saying the light of Christmas only has meaning if there is such a thing as darkness that existed before Christmas. Night has meaning because of day and day has meaning because of night. So what is the darkness into which this Christmas light comes? In what way was it dark? Well, light in the Bible is often used as a metaphor for divine revelation. In fact, do you remember when Simeon sees the Christ child he says, “Behold, my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a LIGHT for revelation to the Gentiles.” Revelation is LIGHT. Revelation is a fancy word for God revealing something to man that was previously unknown and could not be known. When God speaks through either word or deed, we call that revelation. So, therefore, no revelation, no word from God, no communication from God = darkness. So when we say that before Christmas there was darkness this is what we mean. There was no revelation. God was silent. In our Bibles we have what we call the OT and then the NT and there’s 400 years in between that is sometimes called the 400 silent years. I used to think that meant we didn’t know what happened during that time or that it was a boring time because nothing happened. They are certainly NOT silent in those ways. These were some of the loudest and most well documented years in all of history. They are silent in that God is not speaking. There is no revelation. The heavens are as bronze. There are no prophets. There are no books of the Bible being written. These are dark years. Where is God? So the light of Christmas is when new revelation from God comes slicing into a world where God has not spoken for 400 years. Today we are going to do something a little different. Our passage for today is Luke 1:26-38 which is a passage about Mary being visited by the angel Gabriel which is the light slicing into this prophetic darkness. So rather than reading Luke 1:26-38 and talking through it verse by verse like we normally do, 95% of the message today is going to be setup so that we can hear Luke 1:26-38 the way Mary did, and I think if we do that work, the passage will pretty much speak for itself. So don’t expect a normal message today. Today we are going to tell the story of how the world became dark and what it would have felt like when all of the sudden the…

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