Think about the visits of the angels, and this newborn baby, and what's more warm and fuzzy than a newborn baby, right? Just the beauty of that. You have a very young mother, you have a caring husband, Joseph, you have them overcoming in a possible situation that was thrust upon them, you have joyful shepherds coming and rejoicing and worshiping God because of him, you got guests who come with valuable gifts from afar, traveling a long ways and worshiping this king.

And it's all such a great story in that way. We tend to stop there, don't we? There's more to this story than just that. We forget about the shame and the scandal of this curious pregnancy that happened. We forget about the arduous travel over many days and we forget about the manger and the stinking animals and the hasty retreat to a foreign land and the killing of innocent babies and the terror of wicked kings.

There's much more to the story than what we usually think about underneath the warm and fuzzy surface, there's actually a war raging there. This long journey to Nazareth that we're going to talk about today demonstrates this reality. Matthew has showed us in the first couple of chapters here that the coming of Jesus was the fulfillment of the salvation of God, the salvation promises of the Old Testament that God worked out his ultimate salvation plan in and through Jesus Christ and he came to be with us. He is God with us and Jesus Christ.

Last week we encountered the wonder and joy of these wise men who traveled to honor this newborn king of the Jews. The passage ended last week with the wise men defying the order of Herod the king to return to him and they went home by another way. They skirted Herod in Jerusalem and didn't go back to him as he commanded. And this is what launches us into our passage this morning.

The message this morning is that in the midst of a messy world, God works out his saving purpose in the protection of his Son. Let's face it, though warm and fuzzy pleasant dream it's really not our reality, at least not all the time if we're honest. It's hard to look around our own lives. It's hard to look around the world and feel this great warm sense of hope in what we see. We'll deal this morning with kind of a cold reality … find that the warm and fuzzy dream is still out there. It's real, but we can see it and experience it if we find the real meaning underneath the surface.

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