In the book and recent film, Project Hail Mary, we read and see a hero, Rylan Grace, who seeks to save the world with a last ditch effort, using all that he has to try and save Earth. I'll spare the details so that I don't give away any spoilers, but the synopsis on Google says this. A school teacher wakes up in space trying to resolve the issue of the sun dimming. Let me tell you that to you again. A school teacher who is not NASA certified has been tasked to save the world with the issue of the sun dimming. The mission sounds impossible. The hero is unlikely. Their circumstances are dire. For Rylan Grace, he enters space to try and save the world. But the story we are presented here in Matthew's Gospel tells of a hero who's outside of space and time, but chooses to enter it, to save the world from the insidious and inescapable problem of sin. Sin is what corrupts our hearts. To be anti-God, it also corrupts our world. It is because of sin that sickness is rampant, that storms come and go, that death robs us of love, that hatred, jealousy, and anxiety are the air that we breathe. This problem of sin is dire. And doing good deeds don't do anything. If they did, they would have changed their situation by now. The problem of sin reveals that we need a savior. The mission is impossible. Our circumstances are dire. But our hero is supernatural. When seen in this way, the entry of the miraculous birth, a perfect savior who is truly man and truly God, it comes to save the world giving us life. By his very life, it seems far more believable. The cross of Christ was God's means to save his people. It's not a mistake. Today, we will see that the cross of Christ is God's plan to save his people, to be with his people, and for us to be his people. Now we'll serve as our outline this morning. But what we want to see is that God's plan was put in motion at Christ's birth. We'll look at our first point, to save his people. In this passage, we are given an account of how Jesus' birth took place. We are told that Mary and Joseph are engaged, but Mary was found to be pregnant, not with Joseph's child, but she is pregnant with the Son of God. Our hero is not a normal mortal man. Unlike other prophets, other teachers in history, Jesus was not conceived by normal means. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit. The mystery and majesty of this should astound us, that God would come to put on human flesh to be born of a woman, that he would identify with us in his humanity, but be distinct in his divinity, that he is truly God and truly man. Because the problem of a sin cannot be solved by regular means. If they could have been, they would have been fixed already, like I said. We need God to intervene, so he does. Mary and Joseph are engaged. They're not married. And the text tells us that they did not know each other. They were not intimate with each other. And so according to Jewish law, they did not, they were not intimate. But Joseph finds out that Mary is pregnant. And so he thinks that there's been adultery. And so he thinks to end his engagement by divorcing her quietly, not trying to put her to shame. But as he is in the midst of considering this, God intervenes by sending an angel. In this, Joseph was made aware of God's plan, to save God's people through the child to be born, giving Joseph the name of God's son, Jesus, which means Yahweh saves. But Matthew gives us more information about Jesus' name. He tells us that Jesus will save his people from their sins. Jesus is the Latin translation of the Greek name Jesus, which is the Hebrew name Yeshua, or Joshua, which is a callback to the story of Joshua, who is a great leader who leads the people of God into the promised land. But with Jesus, he is saving his people from their sins and leading them to a greater promised land, a land with God. And the cross was God's means for Jesus to save his people from their sins. We see that this is promised in this passage, that from the cradle to the cross, Jesus was destined to die. But the question we are left with is why? Why did he have to die? The Bible teaches elsewhere that the penalty of sin is death. Jesus' death on the cross was him taking the penalty of sin for sin for all who believe in him. Jesus' death saves his people from the penalty and effects of sin in the world, that we would live with God as we were intended to. To most people, sin is simply just naughty and delectable thoughts and actions that make being human exciting. Sin is more than naughty words and behaviors. It is actions, thoughts, and desires that do not accord with God's law. Sin is coercive. It is even desirable. But that doesn't make it good. Sin will destroy your life. It will destroy your friendships. Think about gossip. It feels good to maybe spill tea. But the reality is that somebody, somebody always gets burned. Sin will destroy intimacy, whether by hookup culture or by other deviations. Expression does not lead to flourishing. Sin will destroy you, whether it's selfishness, jealousy, gluttony, or lust. Or on a day-to-day level, think of the anger you might have with a spouse or significant other. Or for you kids, the ways in which that you might get angry and speak to your parents. These moments highlight for us that sin destroys. God's law was given not to restrict human freedom, but to cause human flourishing. And if it's not followed, if God's law is not followed, it leads to the destruction of life. Sin's consequences are not just known horizontally on a human relationship plane. There are consequences both between us and God. There are consequences vertically. There's a vertical dimension to sin. As it breaks God's law, it's an affront on God. Most of us in this room, we're people that like to play by the rules, whether at work or in society. When somebody doesn't do the right thing, we all scream for justice. But when it comes to an all-knowing, perfect, and holy God, we seem to take issue with it, thinking that God is binding us instead of freeing us. The same way that sin destroys human relationship, there's a broken relationship with God that needs to be mended. Many faiths teach that you can mend this yourselves by just doing good deeds that somehow outweigh the bad, that you can somehow make your way back to God. This is not what the Bible teaches. We need to be saved from sin and its consequences. We need a third-party intervention. And this intervention comes from God to repair what is broken. God must save us from our sins. Like I said earlier, they're insidious. They're too many to count. And left to our own devices, we might be moral, but we will not be holy. We will not live a life with God as we are intended to live. God himself needs to intervene. He needs to deal with the problem because all we do is make a bigger problem. So what does God do? He sends his son. He sends Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, born of the Virgin Mary, to save his people from their sins. At Easter, we look at this salvation most closely, seeing that Jesus accomplished this mission for all who believe on the cross. So we've seen that the cross is God's plan to save his people. Let us secondly look at how it is God's plan to be with his people. Look at me at verses 22 to 23. The birth of Jesus took place this way, that the prophecy of Isaiah 7 would be fulfilled. Like I said earlier, Isaiah is writing hundreds of years earlier, but Jesus' birth fulfilled this prophecy, that God would dwell with his people, that God would be with his people. Yes, this took place at the incarnation that God would be among humans, but it was accomplished. This reality was accomplished at the cross so that Jesus saves us from our sin, and he saves us to himself for all who believe, that we would know God and live life with God by faith. C.S. Lewis, the Christian author who is famous for writing the Narnia series, said, one of the ways you know that you're not meant for this world is because you have a desire that cannot be satisfied. Each of us in this room know the life on earth is pretty good, but deep down we know that there has to be better. Whether you're a Christian or not, you know there's something to life that's not met, that it's not met with wealth or family or status or drugs or alcohol. They might scratch an itch for a little while, but they truly cannot satisfy. In recent years, there's been a growing number of people who identify as spiritual, and I think this is largely because they are waking up to this idea that there's something more to life, and so they go searching. For the lost and the found, the truth is that God came to dwell with you. He made a way for you to know him, to have relationship with him, that the life that you were made for is life with God. It is a life that you were intended to live, the life where you were made whole. This is why God sent his son so that you would know what you were intended for, that you would truly have true satisfaction. At the cross, we are saved from our sins, but we are restored to relationship with God. At the cross, Jesus is taking our sins, and we're given his righteousness. The perfect sinless life that Jesus lived is merited to you if you believed in him, so that you can live and write relationship with God today. The cross is not revisionist history, as I said earlier. These verses, we see that God is on a mission, and he made a way for humanity to be saved from their sins, to be united to him by faith, as we are intended to live. And I keep saying we were intended to live this way, but that's because at the beginning of the Bible, we read a story about Adam and Eve. Culturally and even societally, many of us know this story. We knew that life with God was innocent and right and good, but it was lost because of the sin of Adam and Eve. And in Jesus and in the cross, God seeks to bring us back to himself, so that his people would be saved and that they would be with him. Jesus was born so that sinners like us could live with God. I'll say that again, Jesus was born, so that sinners like us could live with God. The question we're left with is how can this be true for ourselves? How can we be one of his people? And this brings us to our third point. The cross was God's plan for us to be his people. This point is not explicit in our text, the passage that we've read, or even the passage we've read throughout the service, but this is the way that you can be one of God's people. It is by repentance and faith. It is by turning from your sin, all the ways that you break God's law, turning from that and trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins. And as you do that, and if you do that today, and I pray that you would, for those who have not, I want you to also know that Jesus' salvation is not something that leads to life without suffering or struggle. It isn't the road to utopia, but it is the road to the kingdom of God. It is the place where God is with his people, a life where you know him and live with him now and forever. And if you want that, turn to him today, so that you can look to him and trust in him, seeing with clarity the mission of Jesus Christ that he accomplished to save us for all who believe.