PURPOSE: To point out to listeners how much we owe to Luke for what we celebrate at Christmas.

Do you have a nativity scene at your house?

It's amazing how many of the images of Christmas come from the gospel of Luke. Without Luke we wouldn't have much of a Christmas visually.

I. Luke gives us the warm coloring of Christmas.

Mary and Joseph coming to Bethlehem, searching for a place and having to settle probably for a drafty cave.

Because Jesus was born in a stable, Luke brings us all the animals that we have in a nativity scene, not to mention the shepherds and angels.

Luke is responsible for most of the Christmas carols that we sing—"Angels We Have Heard On High," "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," "Away in a Manger," "O Little Town of Bethlehem," "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night," "Silent Night," etc.

If you like Christmas scenes, Luke is the one who gives them to us in Luke 2:1-20.

II. Luke was a physician who took it upon himself to write to a man named Theophilus to give him an orderly account of Jesus' life. (He also wrote the Acts of the Apostles to Theophilus as well.)

Who was Luke? He was an educated man, writing a very orderly gospel in beautiful Greek.

It's reasonable, then, that he would start with the events leading up to Jesus' birth.

Luke wasn't trying to embellish the story. The birth of Jesus was pretty earthy. Luke reports it, but God planned it that way.