No Ordinary Baby

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I remember back when I was in high school, all those years ago. It’s more years than it seems like. But I remember back when I was in high school, we used to get irritated with the principal making announcements because he would announce everything.

Well, and it really wasn’t him. It was anybody in the office would make announcements and they would announce everything. Like, good morning, more high school teachers and students.

We’re having school today. Like, we know that. We’re already here.

We got it. but they would announce every little thing. It wasn’t this bad, but it seemed like they would feel the need to come on the intercom and stop what we were doing to announce that the sky was blue.

Like, thank you for that breaking news right there. And it would just drive us crazy, and we got to where we would kind of imitate it. We would tell each other obvious things and do it in the style of morning announcements.

And that happens in a lot of places, not just in schools. It happens in the workplace. Something that could be taken care of in an email or something that people just know, we have to have a big announcement, we have to have a meeting.

There’s an episode of The Office, and I don’t necessarily condone or encourage or celebrate everything that’s in that show, but I will say there are some things in that show that remind me that are very accurate to some of the offices I’ve worked in in the past. But there’s an episode where one of the ladies gets everybody’s attention and makes an announcement regarding their paychecks and says, your paychecks will be here at the normal time and in the correct amount. Stay tuned for further announcements regarding your paycheck. And it’s just, I’ve seen things like that in real life.

And it’s irritating. We get irritated when that happens. We get frustrated by the extraneous announcements.

I have a friend who visited my church, well, visited our church, as a matter of fact, and said afterwards how much they enjoyed the service. I said, what did you enjoy about it? And they said, you got in there, you did what you were there to do, and you got done.

There wasn’t a bunch of nonsense. I asked somebody, what kind of nonsense is he talking about, announcements. We do have announcements, but if you’re ever thinking, oh, here it takes forever with the announcements, apparently it could be worse.

But we want to hear the important announcements. We don’t want to hear every extraneous piece of information that we can read in the bulletin, or that we can see in an email, or that we just know because it’s the way things always are. We want to hear the important announcements.

And when we’re making announcements, we want to make sure that the important announcements get across. Throughout the month of December, I want to spend some time with you looking at some announcements that God made. We’re coming into.

. . How’s this for an extraneous announcement?

We are coming into the Christmas season, if you didn’t already know that. If you can’t tell by the decor behind me. We are coming into the Christmas season.

And as we do that, and as I’ve been studying the story of Jesus’ birth again, all the stories surrounding Jesus’ birth, I realized there were a number of announcements regarding what God was doing. God made at least five announcements to at least five individuals or groups of people. And so for the next few weeks, I want to spend some time looking at those announcements.

Because God made announcements all throughout Scripture, and God never announced anything that wasn’t important. But when it came time for Jesus to show up, when it came time for Jesus to appear, God spent a tremendous amount of time making announcements and announcing important information about who Jesus was, why he was coming, and what God was doing, because he wanted to make sure we got the important information. He wanted to make sure we understood what he was doing.

So for the next few weeks, I want to look at, you know, we could look at all sorts of things during this time. I’ve watched videos of sermons and church services where they didn’t even open the Bible. They talked about somebody’s opinion.

If I got up here this morning and gave you my opinion about the state of the world, that’s just an extraneous announcement. Let’s look together at what God thought was important enough to announce. And so I’m going to ask you to turn with me to Luke chapter 1 this morning.

Luke chapter 1. And if you’re able to, again, I said last week, if you’re at home and you’re not too weak from COVID and not bundled up under the covers, and Charles said, bundled up under the covers. I said, don’t you sometimes put a blanket on to watch TV.

So if you’re watching and you’re not bundled up, if you’re able to, go ahead and stand with me and we’ll read together from God’s Word. Luke chapter 1, starting in verse 26, says, Now in the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.

And having come in, the angel said to her, Rejoice, highly favored one, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women. But when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and considered what manner of greeting this was.

Then the angel said to her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a son, and shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Highest. And the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David.

And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. Then Mary said to the angel, How can this be, since I do not know a man? And the angel answered and said to her, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the highest will overshadow you.

Therefore also that Holy One, who is to be born, will be called the Son of God. Now indeed, Elizabeth, your relative, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is now the sixth month for her, who was called barren, for with God nothing will be impossible. Then Mary said, Behold the maidservant of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word.

And the angel departed from her. So in the story, Gabriel appeared to Mary to announce the birth of Jesus. God, after about 400 years of what we call the silent years, where God wasn’t giving new special revelation to his people.

There were no recorded prophets, none of that, from the time of Malachi up until this period of time. God finally speaks up, and God finally breaks into their monotony, into their world, to make an announcement. And the announcement was the birth of Jesus.

And everything about this announcement was a surprise to Mary. First of all, such an amazing announcement as this, it would not have been expected in a place like Nazareth. And we hear the story now and we think, well, Jesus was from Nazareth.

Naturally, you know, that’s where this was always going to happen. They expected the Messiah, which is what Jesus was coming to be. They expected the Messiah to come in the royal courts somewhere in Jerusalem, some major city somewhere, some center of power, some center of influence.

Not Nazareth, a little backwater town. They weren’t expecting that. They weren’t expecting that when God finally spoke up and told the people what he was doing, that it would be to someone in Nazareth, that God would be active in Nazareth.

They certainly didn’t expect that he would appear to a teenage girl in this backwater town. We can tell from Mary’s reaction that there was apparently nothing remarkable about her that would have caused her to see herself in the way that the angel addressed her. You know, he says she’s found favor with God.

He says she’s blessed. He says all these things. Mary was troubled, not just by the appearance of the angel.

That would be frightening. But she was troubled at his saying, verse 29 tells us, and considered what manner of greeting this was. So even though Mary was undoubtedly a little disturbed, a little frightened probably by the presence of an angel, Mary was just as much disturbed and confused by the fact that he has showed up near her.

Someone who, from man’s perspective, would have been fairly unremarkable. And he has showed up and he has talked about how blessed and highly favored she is. And how God has noticed her.

And how God has chosen her for something remarkable. I mean, she was shocked by this. She was shocked that it was happening in Nazareth.

She was shocked that God was involving somebody like her in his plans. and she was also shocked that she would be involved and that she would be chosen for this task because she was a virgin. I’m not going to spend a tremendous amount of time on this because my children are watching, but we know that’s not how things work.

And so she’s just as puzzled as any of us would be. You know, if somebody had come to me at that age and said, you’re going to have a son, I would have been mystified. That would not have been possible.

And she’s having the same reaction. Everything about this announcement was a surprise. When God showed up to Mary, well, speaking through the angel Gabriel, of course, but it’s not really about the messenger, it’s about the message, and it came from God.

So even though Gabriel’s the mouthpiece, it’s God speaking to Mary, it’s God conveying the message. So when God makes this announcement to Mary, everything about it shocks her, that what God is doing is taking place in Nazareth, that he’s involving her, and that things are going to happen that she cannot rationally or scientifically explain. It’s a shock to her.

But we see here that Mary didn’t dismiss the message out of hand. You know, sometimes things will be said to us, or God will nudge us to do something, and it doesn’t make sense to us, and we’ll kind of dismiss it. We’ll say, well, if I can’t understand it, or if God, you’re not going to go over every step of the plan with me in excruciating detail and satisfy all my curiosity, then I’m just not going to believe it or I’m just not going to do it.

That’s kind of our attitude sometimes. But Mary didn’t dismiss the message. You’ll notice she didn’t say this can’t happen.

Her question is, how will this happen? When she said, how can this be in verse 34? She’s not saying, God, you’ve made a mistake.

God, you can’t do this. She’s genuinely curious. Because I think even in that moment, Mary knew that if God said it, it was going to happen.

But her curiosity has gotten the better of her, just as any of ours would. Okay, how’s he going to pull this off? She said, how can this be?

How does God intend to do this? What’s God’s game plan here? And so Gabriel explained that it wasn’t a problem for God.

It wasn’t going to tax God in the slightest. And from both the announcement and the explanation, we see the point here of all of this is that what she was about to experience was going to be no ordinary birth, and Jesus would be no ordinary baby. This was going to be no ordinary birth, and Jesus would be no ordinary baby. And I start with the method of how all this is going to take place, because that is Mary’s question.

How is that going to work? Again, I think any of us would have questions like that. God said something seemingly impossible is going to happen, and even if we believe him, we’re going to say, okay, but I’m a little curious as to how.

Can you fill me in a little bit? This was not going to be a typical biological process. There are people out there who say that Jesus was born as the result of typical biological processes.

That was the statement of either Joseph Smith or Brigham Young, that it was just the same as anything else. But the Bible here clearly discounts that. She said, I don’t know a man.

And Gabriel said, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the highest will overshadow you. Now, and some people have made this out to be something other than what it’s intended to be. I remember some comment that some genius made last year in the midst of the Me Too movement that Mary had cause for complaint along those lines.

Listen to me. It doesn’t say that God overpowered her. It said the power of God overshadowed her.

She was willing. She agreed to go through this. She agreed to participate in the plans of God.

And there was nothing unseemly going on here. That word overshadowed is a Greek phrase that describes a gentle action. There’s no attack.

It puts me in mind of the fluttering of a baby in the womb. very gentle. I’ve heard Charla describe that fairly early on, before you can feel a kick when you’re expecting a baby, she says you can feel a kind of a flutter.

That’s not what this Greek phrase is talking about, but it does describe a gentle action that makes me think of that. It’s God doing gentle, intricate work. It’s a phrase that evokes the glory of God entering the temple.

Because this word describes being covered with a cloud. And again, it’s like when the glory of the Lord would descend into the temple, that the presence of God would be there. You say, but I still don’t understand how this happened.

I still don’t understand if there was no biological process that took place there. How did the baby end up in the womb? Listen, if you start from the premise of the Christian worldview that says we believe in a God who can do anything.

We believe in a God who with the words of his mouth, nothing else, just the words of his mouth, spoke to nothing and made everything. We believe in a God who by the power of his own word and simply through the force of his own will created everything out of nothing in six days. If God can handle that, and if you start from that premise, it is not outside of the realm of possibility to believe that the power of God could form the body of an unborn baby in the womb.

What’s that song that I learned as a child, He’s Still Working On Me? It says, it took him just a week to make the moon and the stars, the sun and the earth, and Jupiter and Mars. It says he’s still working on me.

If we start from the premise that God can create all of those things, it is not a stretch to believe that by the power of the Holy Spirit, God could go in, again, nothing unseemly, nothing sexual, but go in there and just by his creative power, form a human body in the womb, and there would be the baby. Now, that doesn’t mean he created Jesus. Jesus is God, God the Son.

He was not created by the Father. He was begotten. That’s a whole different discussion.

But Jesus existed before this. Jesus existed from eternity past. What he created in the womb was not Jesus, but it was a body that Jesus would take as his own. Again, people question how things like this are possible, but within the biblical worldview, there’s nothing that’s consistent with God’s nature that is impossible to him.

Anything that God would do, here’s a simpler way to say that, anything that God would do, God can do. And so if he could create the universe, it’s not impossible that he would create a human body. In fact, Gabriel reminded Mary that God was in the business of doing seemingly impossible things, and he reminded her in verse 36 of her own cousin, who was now six months pregnant against all odds.

He said, Now indeed, Elizabeth, your relative, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is now the sixth month for her, who was called barren. So this is someone who was not able to conceive a child, even in her younger days. This is someone who now is old and past childbearing age, and yet God spoke to her and spoke to her husband and said that she would have a child, and now against all odds, against all the objections of medical science, he said, she’s now expecting.

Now, different thing. There’s a biological process involved there. But if God could guide that, if God could enable that, what can God not do?

Why is it so hard to believe that God could create a body? In verse 37, he reminded her, for with God, nothing will be impossible. And so Gabriel indicated to Mary that not only would the baby be born by God’s own intervention, but he would also be born for God’s own purposes.

He said that the child would be set apart, because he referred to him in verse 35 as that holy one, which is to be born. And that word holy doesn’t just mean they act right and they’re well behaved. That word holy means set apart for God’s purposes.

Everything about this child was miraculous and supernatural. And that’s because Jesus was the Son of God. That’s what makes him so unordinary. He may have been called by the people who knew him growing up the Son of Joseph, but in reality he was and is the Son of God.

He said in verse 35, that Holy One who is to be born, I just mentioned that as he called Jesus that Holy One, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God. And you don’t get the sense there that, well, he’s incorrectly called that. You know, people call you things all the time.

The other day, a few weeks ago in traffic, I got called a very not nice name. I can be called that, but I’m not that. When he said Jesus will be called the Son of God, what he means is he will be the Son of God.

He will be rightly called the Son of God. and he would be called the Son of God in a unique sense. Now, as believers in Jesus Christ, we are adopted into the family.

And we’re told that to those who believe in him, we’re given the power to become the sons of God. We are adopted into the family. We are not the same nature as the Father and Son.

But Jesus is not like the rest of us who are adopted into God’s family. And that’s a wonderful thing, that we’re adopted into God’s family. I don’t mean to trivialize that at all.

But Jesus is not like the rest of us who are merely adopted into God’s family. Jesus is described as being the Son of God by nature. He shares the same nature as the Father.

He is the Son of God in a completely different sense from what anybody else can claim. And he told her in verse 31, And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a son, and shall call his name Jesus. And that name Jesus, or Yeshua in Hebrew, means the Lord saves.

He’s talking about how this baby would come and be the Son of God who would bring salvation. He would literally be the salvation that God provides for His people. It says in verse 32, He will be great and will be called the Son of the Highest. Again, He’s going to be the Son of God, and He’s going to be great like His Father.

You know, sometimes the acorn falls far from the tree. This was not going to be one of those cases. He would be great, and he’ll be called the son of the highest. He’s going to be great in the sense that his father, the highest, is great.

Verse 32 also says, And the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David. His earthly ancestor David, through both Mary and Joseph, biologically through Mary, and legally through Joseph. That enables him to fulfill some of the promises of God when it comes to the Messiah sitting on the throne of David.

That he would be the fulfillment of God’s promises. For thousands of years, God had been making promises to the nation of Israel. And by saying that he would sit on the throne of his father David, that he would be given that throne, points to the fulfillment of God’s promises in Jesus.

Jesus wasn’t just an ordinary baby. He came as the Son of God to fulfill the promises that God made about saving and redeeming and restoring his people. And it says in verse 33, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, over the nation of Israel, and of his kingdom there will be no end.

And so he’s being set up there to be a ruler and a judge over God’s people, just like God himself, just like the Father, and that He’s going to be eternal, just like His Father. Of His kingdom, there will be no end. Earthly kings die.

This is more than an earthly king. This is God the Son in human flesh. He’s eternal. All of this leads us to realize that what He’s announcing here is that this child is going to be born, but it’s not going to be an ordinary birth because it’s not going to be an ordinary child because that child is going to be the Son of God.

This was incredible news. This was some of the most amazing news that anybody had ever heard. And we know that Mary was, again, a little confused.

Mary was a little curious about how these things were going to take place. But the most incredible thing about Mary’s reaction is her faith. Like I said, Mary was confused and Mary was curious.

We know that. But Mary didn’t doubt what God was saying to her through Gabriel. She might have said, how is that going to happen?

But we never see even a hint of cynicism or skepticism in her response. And Mary set a magnificent example for us by her faith. Because you look at her response in verse 38, it says everything.

Behold the maidservant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word. When she says, behold the maidservant of the Lord, she’s saying, I work for you.

I am at your disposal. do with me what you want to do. Use me in your plans however you want. I am at your service.

And then to say, let it be to me according to your word. She says, if that’s what you want to do, do it. That’s incredible faith that Mary didn’t know for sure how it was going to happen.

I’m certain she didn’t have all her questions answered by now. But God said he was sending his son into the world to be a savior, and that he was sending him to be born of a virgin and fulfill that prophecy and fulfill all the promises that God had made to Israel, and that God was going to do this remarkable thing, and she believed it. And as we look at this announcement this morning, that’s the goal for us.

That’s the example for us, to look at these things that God said he would do and take God at his word and believe him. We may still be curious. We may be confused about some things, I’m still, after all these years, still confused about some of what I read in Scripture.

You know what? I don’t have to have all my questions answered before I believe God. And I’m not talking about turning off your brain either and just accepting what everybody tells you.

But God has a tremendous track record of faithfulness and keeping His promises and fulfilling His Word, doing what He said He would do. When we come to this point where God’s been promising for thousands of years to send a Savior. He finally says, I’m doing it.

She believed. Well, all throughout scripture, God told us that he was sending a Savior. And the message of his word to us this morning is that he’s done it.

Now, the circumstances are a little bit different for us, actually quite a bit different for us than they were for Mary. Circumstances are different, but the question posed to us is the same. God said it.

Do we believe it? God’s told you that he’s sending a savior, that he’s sending his son to save all those who would believe. And his word tells us he has.

Now, do you look at him and say, God, that’s great, but I’ve got questions. And until I get all my questions answered, I’m not buying it. You can’t do that.

Or do we respond like Mary? So I’ve got questions. There’s still some things I don’t understand, but you said it, and I believe it.

Now this morning, if you believe it, if you believe it for the first time, If you’re saying, he sent Jesus to save me, you need to understand that all of mankind, including me and including you, we have all sinned against God. We are all separated from this holy God by our sin. And we can’t ever do enough good to change the fact that we’ve sinned and done wrong.

We can’t save ourselves. We are destined to remain separated from God all through this life and throughout eternity, which means being separated from him in hell. and we can’t do a thing to change it.

We can’t do a thing to fix it. So Jesus came to fix it for us. He came to live a perfect sinless life, to be nailed to the cross in our place, to shed his blood on our behalf, and die to pay the full price of our sins, to bear all the punishment that we deserve, so that our slate could be wiped clean.

This morning, God’s Word tells you that he has sent a Savior. And the question for you is whether or not you believe it. If you’ve never trusted Him as your Savior before, it’s as simple as admitting to God that you’ve sinned and need a Savior, acknowledging to Him that you believe that Jesus came and died and rose again to be that one and only Savior, and then crying out to Him for His forgiveness because of what Jesus Christ did.