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I don't know how you were raised in terms of religious upbringing, but the tradition I was brought up in and I think a lot of you can probably identify with this is that I was encouraged at a very young age

to pray some sort of salvation prayer. In my case to ask Jesus to come in in my heart, here's my been a little bit different to pray, need to ask Jesus to be your Savior.

The focus of all that was about entering in, entering into something, ultimately entering into heaven one day, which is very important, right?

I don't regret that decision at all. I'm so glad that my parents encouraged me to make that decision as a child.

But when you follow Jesus through the gospels, like you read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, these four amazing accounts of the life of Jesus, the emphasis is very different.

It's not so much about entering into something someday. It's primarily about participating in something right now.

And the problem is when we reduce, either for children or more so for ourselves, when we reduce Jesus to ascend, forgive, and a ticket to heaven, we actually miss out on his primary call to our lives and on our lives to participate in something right now.

And what happens is, and we don't do this on purpose, and nobody does this to us on purpose, in those moments we become believers rather than participators, to believe in rather than to participate in something.

Now in the first century, these were synonymous, the believers participated as we're going to see today.

Because first century believers apparently understood something that we easily, and I think in some cases we intentionally overlook, that with the birth of Jesus, a king was born.

A king who would actually establish in this life on this planet an upside down others first kingdom in the here and now.

A kingdom of conscience, a kingdom of the heart, a kingdom that was to move a group of people in societies every language, every nation, every generation of the world, so that there would be a new kind of kingdom ethic instituted and modeled by a king.

Today we're in part two of our Christmas series, the day after Christmas. And as we said last week on the day after Christmas, everybody was anxious to get back to normal because on the day after that first Christmas things were very chaotic.

In an effort to update the tax base and to make sure Romney who was alive, where they live and if they were paying enough taxes, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken, this is amazing, so ambitious, of the entire Roman world.

So everybody had to go to their place of birth, which for many people wasn't hard because they lived in their place of birth, but many people had to travel to their place of birth to register so the empire would know how many citizens do we have, where are they and are we getting enough taxes and if not, how can we increase the tax base or how can we increase the income to the empire.

Of course, all this traveling around, as you know, is what set the stage for the very first Christmas, but in those days, and this is so hard for us to imagine, in those days there was no Christmas. Again, it was just chaos. And in the chaos, a child was born.

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