Series

In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, [27] to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. [28] The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you."

[29] Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. [30] But the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. [31] You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. [32] He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, [33] and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end."

[35] The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.

I was putting up my house Christmas lights recently, and a neighbor stopped by to say, “Getting into the Christmas spirit, huh?” I thought yes, but this phrase, or “the spirit of Christmas”, has been so emptied of meaning that people routinely fill it up with any meaning they like. It can mean a spirit of generosity, or general celebration marked by house lights and parties, of romanticized family gatherings that are seldom as wonderful as the air-brushed pictures make them seem. It can be a marketing ploy designed to get you to put money in the Salvation Army kettle (which you should do, by the way!). But this morning I want to talk about another Spirit of Christmas—the Holy Spirit, and His role in the coming of Christ.

To begin with, the Holy Spirit had been inspiring prophecies and predictions about Jesus for centuries before He came.

2 Peter 1:20-21, “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. [21] For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” There are tons of hints, foreshadowings, literary types, and direct prophecies in the Old Testament about the coming Messiah. (If you would like a list of some of those, send me an email to that effect, or give me a note (you can hand it to an usher) and I’ll get it to you.) The writers of these passages didn’t make these things up on their own. They spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. The word translated “carried along” is used elsewhere in the New Testament of a ship driven before the wind. The prophets raised their sails by being receptive and obedient, and the wind of the Holy Spirit filled them with His thoughts and words.

We’re thinking especially about the birth of Christ today, so here are some familiar Old Testament prophecies about that:

· Isaiah 7:14, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”

· Isaiah 9:6, “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

· Micah 5:2, “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times."

There are many more prophecies in the Old Testament about the life, ministry, and death of the Messiah, but this gives you a sample of the kind of thing we’re talking about. What man would predict a virgin birth? Or be foolish enough to be so specific as to name a totally obscure little hamlet as the birthplace of the Savior of the world? These are not human notions—they were inspired by the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit also inspired a number of people to speak at the time of Jesus’ birth

Elizabeth was the wife of Zechariah, a priest, and the relative, possibly a cousin, of Mary. She and Zechariah had grown old without ever having children. But one day, Zechariah had an encounter with an angel, who told him Elizabeth was going to have a son, and shortly thereafter, she became pregnant. About six months later, the angel appeared to Mary to tell her that she was going to have a son, who would be the Son of God. Mary, being a virgin, wondered how this was going to happen. So to help her believe, the angel told her that Elizabeth was already pregnant. Luke 1:39-45, “At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, [40] where she entered Zechariah's home and greeted Elizabeth. [41] When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. [42] In a loud voice she exclaimed: ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! [43] But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? [44] As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. [45] Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished!’”

Elizabeth was filled with the Spirit. Evidently, the Spirit told her that Mary was pregnant, because how else could she know that? Mary certainly wasn’t showing yet, and she was a virgin, so Elizabeth would have no reason to think that Mary was pregnant. She not only knows her younger relative is pregnant, she knows Mary’s child would be her Lord.

I told you who Zechariah was. After their son, John (the Baptist) was born, we read, Luke 1:67-79, “His father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied.”

Here’s the gist of what he said: First, he spoke about Jesus, who at that time was six months away from being born. He says that in Jesus, God has come (he uses the past tense to indicate the certainty of it—it is the will of God, so it will happen that way, no matter what)—God has come to redeem His people; He has brought salvation to them; He has shown mercy to them; and been faithful to His covenant that He established 2,000 years before with Abraham.

Then Zechariah went on to speak about his own son who had just been born, and said that he would be a prophet of the Most High, who would prepare the way for the coming Messiah by calling people to repent of their sins.

Again, there is no way Zechariah could possibly know these things about these two boys, one of which hadn’t even been born yet. He was filled with the Holy Spirit, who revealed these things to him.

It’s interesting to me that God would choose a man like Zechariah to deliver this prophecy, considering the fact that he had doubted the angel’s announcement that Elizabeth would have a child. This is actually a theme that runs throughout the Bible—that God uses deeply flawed and sinful people to accomplish His work. Abraham, the father of the Jews, lied repeatedly about his relationship with his wife, Sarah, in order to protect his own skin; Samson, the famous “judge” of Israel before the monarchy, was a womanizer, a liar, a cruel man, and one who violated not only the command not to marry foreign women, but his vow never to cut his hair; David, the greatest king Israel ever had, was guilty of adultery and murder; and on and on it goes. In the New Testament, we have the church at Corinth, full of very selfish, self-centered people, who are nonetheless blessed with all sorts of supernatural manifestations of the Holy Spirit. All I can say is, Praise God! Thank God that He can, and does, use broken, sinful people like you and me. Our sinfulness is not an impediment to His grace or power, and that is really encouraging. If you have ever thought that some sin in your life, or some character flaw you have disqualifies you from being used by God, let the example of Zechariah (and all these other people) dispel that notion. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to be as godly as we can, but it does mean God can use even you and me.

There was a man in Jerusalem at the time Jesus was born named Simeon. He was a godly man, who believed the Old Testament prophecies about the coming Messiah, and was eagerly waiting for God’s man to arrive on the scene. Luke 2:26, “It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord's Christ. [27] Moved by the Spirit, he went into the temple courts,” just as Joseph and Mary arrived to dedicate Jesus. [28] “Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying:

Through the power of the Holy Spirit, Simeon knows and proclaims that the baby Jesus—just 40 days old[1] at this point—is the means of God’s salvation for all mankind—including the Gentiles! That would have been unthinkable to any Jew of that day—except that the Spirit revealed it to him.

So the Holy Spirit was active in inspiring prophecies about Christ, both centuries before He was born, and around the time of His birth. But the Holy Spirit also had a far more significant role as the true Spirit of Christmas.

In the passage the elder read earlier, God sent the angel Gabriel to tell Mary that she was going to have a baby. Naturally, she wondered how this was going to happen, since she was a virgin. Luke 1:35, “The angel answered, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.’”

It’s a little vague, and maybe even a little ominous: The Holy Spirit will “come upon you”, and the power of the Most High will “overshadow” you. What was a young teenage girl supposed to think of that?

Matthew then reports how it went with the announcement to Joseph: Matthew 1:18-20, “This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. [19] Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly. [20] But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.’”

The angel announced that Mary would be pregnant “from the Holy Spirit”; Matthew paraphrased to say she would be pregnant “through” the Holy Spirit. Not a lot of details here, except to say that this miraculous conception was a result of the Holy Spirit working in Mary, not the result of her being with a man. There is a lot of mystery here. We want to know the biological details; we are curious about how the Holy Spirit could fertilize one of Mary’s eggs so that the virgin could bear a son. We want to know the how, but all we are told is the result of the Spirit’s action.

B. The result: Incarnation Luke 1:35; John 1:1-3, 14; 10:30; 14:9; Philip 2:5-6; Col 2:9; Heb 1:3

The result is that God became a man. You probably know that the Latin root of the word “incarnation” literally means “in flesh”; or if you are thinking of chili con carne, or carne asada, the word carne means meat. It refers to the very physical “stuff” of our bodies. God, who is Spirit, took on flesh. He didn’t leave behind any of His essential nature or attributes, but He took on a human body and a human nature as well.

Let’s look at a few New Testament passages that speak of this mysterious miracle:

· Luke 1:35. We’ve already seen Luke 1:35, where the angel tells Mary, “So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.”

· John 1:1-3, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [2] He was with God in the beginning. [3] Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made…[14] The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

· Col. 2:9, “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.”

· Hebrews 1:3, “The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being.”

This truth, that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, is the central doctrine of Christianity. Literally everything else that makes us Christians hangs on this fact. You cannot be a Christian without believing this. And this fact, this truth, is beyond us. It reminds me of Psalm 145:3, “Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom.” We really can’t.

Some people might find fault with a faith that has as its central doctrine something that cannot be fully understood by humans. But then, if God could be understood by us, He wouldn’t be a very great God, would He? By definition, the Creator is greater than the creature. Computers are the most complex things ever made by man, and they now have some rudimentary form of artificial intelligence. But no computer has ever, or will ever, fully understand humans. (For that matter, we don’t even understand ourselves all that well!) So I am not troubled by the fact that I can’t understand the Incarnation; I am comforted to know that the God I worship is that much greater than I am.

Instead of trying to explain how God accomplished the incarnation, Scripture points us away from the frustration of our ignorance on that point to the purpose of the Spirit’s action.

Jesus was conceived in Mary by the Holy Spirit so that He might be the Savior. In Matt 1:20-21, the angel goes on from the announcement to Joseph of the miraculous conception to the purpose of that miracle: Matthew 1:20,21, “…what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. [21] She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins."

The New Testament writers do not explore the many questions we have about the incarnation. But the author of the Scripture, the Holy Spirit, gets right to the point that we can understand and desperately need to know: Why? The Creator became one of His creatures in order to be our Savior.

We do need all those things, and He was all those things, but our greatest need of all was for salvation, so He came as a Savior.

Now the question that comes to this generation, as it did not to previous generations in this country, is, “Why do we need a savior?” Most people outside the church really don’t understand why Christians keep talking about “salvation”; it seems like kind of a funny, old-fashioned word to them. Why do we need a Savior? Why was that our greatest need as the human race?

We can begin to get at the answer to that if we ask another question: What do we need to be saved from? The dictionary definition of “save” is: “to rescue from danger, or possible harm, injury, or loss.”[2] We only need to be saved if we are in danger of some harm, injury, or loss. And that is exactly why Jesus came as our Savior. We are in danger of eternal and incomprehensible harm, injury, and loss. Because our independent spirit, our determination to run our lives the way we want, without any reference to the God who made us, has offended Him, and He is going to make us suffer the consequences of that attitude. People say they don’t want God meddling in their lives; they don’t want Him looking over their shoulder; they don’t want Him breathing down their necks. So God says, OK—if that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get. You will spend eternity without Me.

Some people might think that sounds good, until they find out what that means. God is the source of every good thing in our lives.

· He is the creator of all beauty, so try to imagine a life without anything beautiful in it: no sunsets, no beautiful music, no art, no beautiful buildings, no flowers, no peacocks, no mountains, no color, no smiles.

· God is the source of all truth, so try to imagine a life in which you have no idea what is true and what is false, where everything is a lie, or a deception, or a subterfuge; try to imagine life without the possibility of trusting anyone, because they are never telling you the truth.

· God is the source of all that is morally good. Try to imagine a life without any kindness, without any forgiveness, without any gentleness; a life where everyone is impatient, cruel, unhappy, in conflict with everyone else all the time. A life where there are no friends, no love, no joy whatsoever. A life where hatred and cursing and bitterness and anger and selfish ambition and envy are all that you ever experience—in others or in yourself.

Folks, that’s hell! Is that really what you want? Because if it is, that’s what you’ll get. Of course, most people don’t realize that all—literally all—of the good things in life come from God. And it is very hard to imagine a life where there is absolutely nothing good in it. But when we tell God to “get lost”, we are essentially condemning ourselves to that kind of life.

And that’s why we need a Savior. We need someone to save us from ourselves. Left to ourselves, we will reject God, and in the process, reject everything we enjoy about life. Really, a life like that is no life at all, which is why the Bible calls it death. The wages of sin are death.

Do you understand that this terrible future is not the result of things that we typically think of as “sins”? We don’t die spiritually because we smoke, or drink or chew. It’s not because we swear, or lie, or gossip, or watch pornography. People don’t even spend eternity apart from God because they do horrible things like murder, or rape, or child abuse. All those things are merely the symptoms of our problem. The root cause is that we do not want to submit our lives to the One who made us, and who knows far better than we do how life works best. We don’t want to live with God, so we won’t. It’s that simple. And horrible.

So this season of the year we thank God, and we celebrate the birth of Jesus, because He came to save us from our sins—from our sinful desires to live apart from God.

There is a miracle here: a virgin conceived and bore a Son. We speak of the virgin birth, but with modern technology, there is nothing particularly miraculous about a virgin giving birth. The true miracle was in the conception of Jesus by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christmas.

And there is mystery here: As we read these verses about the Holy Spirit coming upon Mary, and the power of the Most High overshadowing her, we are aware that there is much we do not—and cannot—understand. We sense that there is something out there—something beyond us, something awesomely big and powerful and mysterious, and we have trouble even making out its broad outlines.

And then we are led by the Spirit-inspired Scriptures away from the brink of mystery to a food trough in a stable, and there we are invited to worship. Let us worship God for His infinite understanding—He knew how to become a man! Let us worship God for His infinite grace—He became a man so as to become our Savior. Let us admit that we are at the outer limits of our ability to fathom these things, and come, let us adore Him.

[1] See footnote in NIV Study Bible on Luke 2:22

[2] The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, The Unabridged Edition (New York: Random House, 1967).