There Is a King: The King Has Come
Christmas doesn’t come to decorate your life. It comes to claim it.
Christmas doesn’t ask if you’re comfortable. It asks who you belong to.
Christmas has this way of exposing what’s really going on in us.
The lights go up… the music swells… families gather… and under it all sits this deeply human ache we rarely say out loud: we want to belong somewhere we don’t have to earn our seat at the table.
That’s why the holidays can feel magical one moment and heavy the next.
Because every one of us is carrying a story—some joy, some regret, some wounds, some hopes—and we’re quietly wondering if anyone sees the whole thing and still wants us around.
That’s exactly why the apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Galatians matters on Christmas Eve.
But before we open Galatians tonight, it’s worth remembering the road that brought us here.
Throughout this year of teaching here at Sherwood Community Friends Church, we journeyed through Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters 5-7, slowed our lives by practicing the rhythm of Sabbath, learned to listen and speak with God in prayer, learned to live an intentional B.L.E.S.S. way of life, rediscovered freedom through Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and listened to other timely teachers along the way—until Advent carried us here together, heavy with anticipation on the edge of arrival, ready to make one clear confession: there is a King— and everything we’ve been learning finds its meaning in him.
All of it was forming us for this night.
Galatians isn’t a book about “getting your doctrine straight or being religious” as much as it’s a book about getting your heart back. It’s Paul shouting to a tired, confused church: You already belong. You’re already His. Stop trying to earn what Jesus already secured.
Tonight, as we remember the birth of Jesus—the God King who stepped into our world—I want us to remember the gospel that formed the Galatian church is the same gospel that lay in the manger on that first Christmas night.
So let’s walk the road again— reopening Paul’s ancient letter to the Galatian church in one quick zip through—to remember who we are, why Paul wrote this fiery little letter, and why it still speaks straight into our souls.
Galatians Context: Quick Story Behind the Story
Galatians is one of Apostle Paul’s earliest letters. The churches were brand-new—young followers of Jesus scattered through the region of Galatia, currently in modern day Turkey, and they were being pressured by a group called the Judaizers. These people weren’t denying Jesus; they were just adding to Him.
“Jesus is great… but you need this too.”
“Grace is wonderful… but you also need to perform to stay in the family.”
“Faith saves you… yes… but obedience proves you deserve it.”
Paul hears this and immediately stands up, slams both hands on the table, and writes:
Galatians 1:6–7 CSB
“I am amazed that you are so quickly turning away from him who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another gospel...”
Because the moment you add anything to Jesus, you lose the Jesus Way entirely.
Paul writes Galatians because the church was forgetting its center.
And honestly? So do we.
That’s why we return to this letter tonight—because Christmas is God shouting into the cold winter air:
You already belong. Stop striving. Rest in my Son, Jesus.
Jesus might just offer something deeper than everything else you’ve already tried.
Galatians 1–2: A Gospel You Don’t Have to Earn
Paul opens the letter in chapter 1 telling his own story—not to boast, but to remind them that this gospel didn’t come from human origin. He didn’t invent it. He received it from Jesus himself.
In chapter 2 he communicates one sentence that is not only the heartbeat of the whole letter, but an anthem for following the Jesus Way.
Galatians 2:20 CSB
“I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”
Our lives aren’t built on our effort but on Jesus’s sacrifice; so therefore, our identity isn’t self-constructed but God-declared. We are called to live a cruciformed life— a life shaped by the cross.
Christmas echoes this same truth:
The Son of God entered the world not to create religious achievers…
but to form a people who live in Him, by Him, through Him.
This is why pride dies at the foot of the cross.
And shame dies at the cross.
And legalism dies at the cross.
Religion dies at the foot of the cross.
Because the gospel is not performance; it is participation.
We join him in surrendering our lives to him at the cross. And he shares his new life with us.
That’s how we belong in God’s family.
Galatians 3: Children of God, Not Employees of God
In chapter 3, Paul turns the corner and asks the question that rings like a bell:
Galatians 3:3 CSB
“Are you so foolish? After beginning by the Spirit, are you now finishing by the flesh?”
His point is simple:
We don’t grow out of grace. We grow deeper into it.
Paul anchored so much of what he said earlier in the letter about true freedom, faith, God’s promise, and the whole Abraham to Israel storyline culminating in Jesus.
Galatians 3:26 CSB
“For through faith you are all sons [and daughters] of God in Christ Jesus.”
This is identity. Family. Adoption.
And on a night like this—when we come to celebrate a newborn King lying in a manger—Paul’s words land differently:
The child in the manger came to make us children in his Kingdom.
You don’t work your way into this family.
You’re born into it—by grace.
Galatians 4: Adoption, Freedom, and the Cry of the Spirit
As Paul’s pen creased the page into chapter 4, he painted a picture of slaves and orphans becoming sons and daughters.
There was this systematic theological pattern he was building for belonging in God's family.
Galatians 4:4–6 CSB
“When the time came to completion, God sent his Son… to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father!’”
This is Christmas in one paragraph.
Abba Father means we are familiar with God. We have access to have a personal relationship with him.
Jesus didn’t come to give us rules.
He came to give us a Father.
He came to make strangers into family.
He came to give our soul permission to cry out with intimacy, not anxiety.
Adoption is the heart of Galatians.
Belonging is the heartbeat of the gospel.
This is where cruciformity begins because we are all shaped by the cross belonging to God’s family.
Galatians 5: Freedom That Actually Sets You Free
The page turns again and in chapter 5 Paul gets intensely practical.
He talks about what true freedom really looks like.
Not rebellion. Not self-expression. Not doing whatever we want whenever we want.
Biblical freedom is the power to become who we were made to be.
Galatians 5:1 CSB
“For freedom, Christ set us free. Stand firm then…”
This entire chapter bends toward our true selves being transformed by the Holy Spirit, not our flesh selves.
True freedom is not the absence of constraint;
it’s the presence of the right King.
Paul ends Galatians chapter 5 with the life we all quietly long for that is only cultivated through time spent in a surrendered relationship with God:
Galatians 5:22–23 CSB
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
This fruit isn’t anything we could force.
It’s Spirit-grown fruit cultivated in us.
It’s cruciform fruit made possible only when we surrender to Jesus as King.
The kind of fruit that looks an awful lot like the baby in the manger grew up to model for us a new way to live.
Galatians 6: Cruciformity—A Cross-Shaped Life for a Cross-Formed People
In his closing chapter, Paul pulls all his notes together.
Galatians ends where it began:
Jesus at the center.
Galatians 6:14 CSB
“But as for me, I will never boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. The world has been crucified to me through the cross, and I to the world.”
This is the soil where true belonging grows:
People shaped by the cross become a community shaped by grace.
And to me, this is what I think the world is starving for.
Not perfect people
Not self-righteous people
Not ideological tribes
Not religious people
But cross-shaped people
People whose lives look like Jesus—
steady, surrendered, generous, gentle but spicy, bold and calculated, compassionate, faithful to the end.
That’s the church Paul was fighting for.
That’s the church the Spirit is forming today.
That’s the family Jesus was born to create.
The Christmas Connection:
Christmas is God stepping into our story saying:
“You don’t have to earn this.
You don’t have to fix yourself first.
You don’t have to pretend.
You don’t have to hold it all together.
You already belong—come to me and come home.”
The manger was the first sign of the cross.
The cradle opened the way to cruciformity.
The birth of the One Son leads to the adoption of many sons and daughters.
Galatians and Christmas preach the same sermon:
Grace comes first.
Belonging comes before behaving.
Identity comes before transformation.
So What Now?
Tonight, someone needs to hear this:
You don’t have to try harder.
You don’t have to earn your way in.
You don’t have to fear not being enough.
Jesus is enough.
His grace is enough.
His welcome is enough.
And his invitation is simple:
Matthew 11:28-30 NLT
“Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.”
Whether you are long-time follower of Jesus or still deciding if He’s worth your trust—the story this gospel announces calls us to know:
There is a King.
He has come for you, and He wants to form His life within you.
THE KING HAS COME:
Let’s consider now, on Christmas Eve, the manger invites us to take everything we’ve learned…and step right beside the birth of our King.
We forget sometimes that Jesus didn’t float down from heaven through the world like a divine hologram. He stepped into the messy, awkward, emotional, hormonal, painfully human world you and I live in every day.
He entered through a birth canal.
He cried.
He leaked.
He spit up.
He pooped.
He kept Mary and Joseph awake at night.
He had to be held.
He had to be taught.
He had to learn how to walk, how to speak, how to work with His hands.
He was a middle schooler. He was once a kid who got a strange haircut at home and tried to pretend it’s cool. Someone probably teased Him about it on the playground. God in the flesh…with an awkward stage. Can you imagine?
He was a teenager—navigating identity, navigating friendship, navigating if others liked him, navigating temptation. If you’ve ever had someone bully you, judge you, ridicule you…He has too. And if you’ve ever felt alone in a room full of people? So has He.
He was a twenty-something—surrounded by peers who probably thought He should just stick with his non-bio dad Joseph’s carpentry trade. He had those friends who said: “Why chase this calling? Why not make tables? Why not build houses? Why not do what your dad does?” But He knew who He was…even when no one else fully did. And boy did He do what his Father’s work was.
He lived in a world filled with political tension, social anxiety, family conflict, economic pressure, and spiritual confusion.
So if you’ve ever carried trauma or are carrying it now—He knows.
If you’ve ever felt misunderstood—He knows.
If you’ve ever felt unseen or unheard—He knows.
If you’ve ever faced temptation—He knows.
If you’ve ever sat through a tense holiday meal—He knows.
And if you've ever avoided even going to a family gathering— He knows.
If we have faced it, He entered it.
There was no caveat to His humanity.
Not from a distance. Not as an observer. He was fully one of us— and experienced everything we do.
Why?
Because that is what Love does.
Love steps in.
Love joins us.
Love takes the risk.
Love bears the weight we cannot.
Jesus’s Humanity Wasn’t a Detour—It Was the Point.
He came to show us a different way of being human.
A different way to live in a world like ours.
A cruciform way.
A Kingdom way.
The way of a King.
Cruciformity—this cross-shaped life—begins with the birth of the One who would carry that cross for us.
The cradle was already casting a shadow.
The manger was already bending toward Golgotha.
The infant King came with a purpose: to reveal Himself so that we would follow Him to become like Him.
This is why Paul wrote:
Galatians 4:4–7 CSB
“When the time came to completion, God sent His Son… to redeem those under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons [and daughters].”
And now Christmas tells us why it all matters:
Christ’s incarnation is the doorway to our identity.
Because the King has come.
Because His Kingdom is here.
Because this story is our story now.
The meaning of Christmas is that the King became like us so that, by grace, we might become like Him.
John 1:14 NLT
“So the Word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. And we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father’s one and only Son.”
The King wrapped Himself in humanity so we could wrap our lives around His.
Mark 1:15 CSB
Jesus proclaimed: “The time promised by God has come at last! The Kingdom of God is near! Repent of your sins and believe the Good News!”
The cradle points to the cross.
The cross points to the crown.
The crown points to the throne.
And the throne reminds us:
There is a King—and we know Him. We live in His Kingdom. He taught us how to walk in His rhythm, love His people, and rest in His reign.
And He is calling us—today, tonight, right now—to surrender every bit of ourselves— even that stuff tucked away far in the back we futilely hope is hidden from sight, yes even that— to give all of us, our whole selves, to Him as our King.
CLOSING REFLECTION
So here’s the question:
Have you surrendered every part of your life to the reign of King Jesus?
Not:
“Do I believe He exists?”
“Do I like church?”
“Do I admire Jesus?”
But:
Have I bent my knee and bowed my story to His rule?
Have I let the King be King… in me?
Have I surrendered to be crucified with Him?
Because when you do—
freedom becomes real,
identity becomes secure,
true love becomes possible,
purpose becomes clear,
and the story of Christmas— becomes your story.
Tonight the King stands before us.
Not distant. Not harsh. Not demanding. Inviting.
The King who cried in a manger, grew through adolescence, carried human pain, died for our sins, rose from the grave, now says:
“You belong. Come home. Follow me.”
And if you say yes—truly yes—it will change your Christmas.
It will change your year.
It will change your life.
Because the King has come.
And He is here for you.
That is the gospel of Christmas.
Candlelight Transition
In a moment, we’re going to light candles together.
Light matters in Scripture.
From the very beginning, light is how God pushed back the darkness.
And on Christmas, that light didn’t stay distant—
it stepped into the world.
John tells us,
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it (John 1:5).”
That is what Jesus came to do.
To bring God’s light into real darkness.
Into real lives.
Into places that felt hidden, fractured, or forgotten.
Jesus later said something just as substantial to us:
“You are the light of the world.”
Not because the light originates in us—
but because we reflect him
the way the moon reflects the sun.
When we have a candle in your hand,
what we hold is a symbol of that calling.
We receive the light.
And then we carry it.
As the flame is passed, let it remind you:
The light of Christ is not fragile or fearful.
It spreads.
It multiplies.
And it still breaks through the darkness.
Tonight, we hold that light together—
as people shaped by the King,
living in his Kingdom,
reflecting his life and light into the world.
Let’s receive the light of Christ, and worship together.
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