AC | Who was Conceived by the Holy Spirit; Born of the virgin Mary | Luke 1 | Why is the incarnation important?

Intro - Live, in the flesh.

Hey y’all how are y’all? Cool Cool.

So question for you. I know we are all for the most part good Georgia people.

But does anyone in here like Pepsi? Its okay to be wrong.

But coke purists are the most die hard. It’s coke or bust.

Only the real thing. It’s gotta be Coke.

Well,

Have any of you heard about New Coke? It’s not new anymore, its almost 40. But back in the 80’s Coke was losing ground to Pepsi because Pepsi was running a brilliant ad campaign called the Pepsi Challenge.

Basically, Pepsi would go to a mall, when people still went to those, and do a blind taste test.

Get the person to say, “I really coke the best” right before the test. Then always they liked the Pepsi better.

They ran that commercial for ever, and started to actually take over coke’s spot in the market. People were buying Pepsi more than coke.

and here is where the story gets interesting.

Coke decides, okay you like Pepsi better? We will make coke taste like Pepsi.

So Coke has this big press conference, huge marketing campaign around this idea, “We changed the formula.” The Formula is a secret. Only a few people in the world know it. That is part of Coke’s image and story.

It’s part of the founding myth.

So they introduce to the world, New Coke.

What do you think happened?

People lost their ever loving minds. Groups were started, letters sent. People hated New Coke. It didn’t really sell well. People hated it.

Why? It wasn’t the real thing. It wasn’t coke.

But heres where the story ventures to conspiracy land.

There are people, me included, who think, New Coke was made to intentionally bomb. Because eventually, i think 6 months to a year, they brought back old formula Coke under the name Coca Cola Classic.

They brought back the real thing. And what happened, they destroyed Pepsi, and Pepsi hasn’t gotten close to coke since.

I know we are talking about coke right now, but this where we are going to live tonight, This idea of it has to be the real thing. It can’t be anything else.

Context - The Virgin Birth the First Miracle of the Gospel.

So tonight we are looking at the third line in the AC, which says, Who was Conceived by the Holy Spirit; Born of the virgin Mary.

Looking at why do we have to believe this to be a base level. Because what this deals with is the incarnation of God. By Confessing this, it is God in the flesh. Its not just that God came down, but that God came down and became one of us.

That is a vitally important belief that we as Christians must hold.

One of the commentaries I was using to prepare called this the gateway Miracle. That this was the first Miracle of the Gospel.

So let’s get in to scripture and then we’ll look at why it is important that we believe this to be true.

So if you have a bible, flip over to Luke 1:26-35 if you need a bible throw a hand up. Who needs a bible?

Cool.

Lets read this passage together. But be fore we do that, let’s pray for our time in the word.

Pray with me.

Pray

Okay cool, let’s read this together.

Luke 1:26–35 ESV

26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, 27 to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary. 28 And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” 29 But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. 30 And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. 31 And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” 34 And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” 35 And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.

SO this is a story that have heard so many times that we almost gloss over it. An angel comes to Mary, surprise, its a boy! and we move on over to the actual birth story, no room in the inn.

But look at this, this is the first major Miracle of the New Testament.

For 400 years God has been silent. God has not spoken to his people.

Think about it. The OT is written in Hebrew all the way. But the NT is written in Greek. Have you ever thought why?

Lil guy named Alexander the Great knocked off the greatest empire up to that point. The Persians went away and then the Romans came to be the greatest Empire up to that point and Greek became a universal language of sorts. They spoke greek every where.

So a lot has changed in history between the testaments.

And now we have God speaking again. To a girl named Mary.

And Mary is just as confused as you would be. She is like, but how? I’m not married yet, I’m still a virgin, takes two to make this happen.

And what does the angel say? Lk 1:35

Luke 1:35 ESV

35 And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.

So what does that mean. First off this is telling, this is no normal conception.

Duh.

We call it the virgin birth. It’s an oxymoron. It’s like a square circle. Two diametrically opposed things.

But look at the word used here, and the power of the most high will overshadow you.

That word overshadow. Thats a weird word. It seems out of place, and the translating really gets lost on us.

But its a throw back to Exodus 40:35

Exodus 40:35 ESV

35 And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled on it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.

SO in the OT, the presence of the Lord was said to be manifest in the form of a cloud. In the wilderness, a cloud in the day, pillar of fire at night.

At the Tabernacle which was where the jewish people worshiped, the cloud rested there.

It was called the Shekinah Glory. It was a very specific term. It means the dwelling place of God.

So overshadowed is a call back to this term.

So what what is being said here is not you are going to have a boy. But that, God is going to dwell and manifest himself as a son. The Child will be holy, the Son of God.

And so this is the first miracle we see in the NT. a virgin is going to give birth to the son of God, because God is going to wrap himself in flesh and allow himself to be born. To become one of us.

The Word Became Flesh and Dwelt among us.

So I want us to see some things in this. Why it is so important for us to hold this as a core belief.

P1 - Jesus in the Womb, Jesus on the Cross. Mohler pg. 44 - Objections to Jesus being divine. Objections to Jesus being God from the start. Mormons. Secularists.

So if you don’t have Christ in the womb ,then you can’t have Christ on the Cross.

What I mean by that is, without Jesus being divine from the start then he can do nothing for us on the cross.

I love what Al Mohler says in his book on the AC he says,

without a proper understanding of Jesus in the womb one would never understand the significance of Christ on the cross.

Basically, you need this first miracle, to have the good news.

So think about the culture that we live in, and just all of the ideas there are about who Jesus is.

We live in Gray, not exactly a hot bed of atheistic rhetoric. Don’t see a lot of that, but we do have a weirdly large Mormon population.

Lots of y’all are friends of with Mormons, cool, they’re nice people, but we worship different Gods. We worship a different Jesus.

This is from their website:

Mormons believe that all men and women ever to be born, including Jesus Christ, lived with God as His spirit children before this life. God wanted each of us to come to earth to gain experience, learn, and grow to become more like Him. But God also knew that His children would all sin, die, and fall short of His glory. We would need a Savior to overcome our sins and imperfections and reconcile us with God. Mormons believe that Jesus Christ was chosen to be this Savior long ago during our premortal life with God.

Then just a little more, about his life

Mormons believe that Jesus was born as an infant in Bethlehem. As the child of God the Father and a mortal mother, Mary, He grew up learning His divine mission and His Father’s gospel line upon line, precept upon precept (see D&C 98:12). Mormons believe that Jesus Christ lived a perfect mortal life to set the ultimate example for us to follow. He became the Messiah, the promised Savior of God’s people whose coming prophets had long foretold. The scriptures record that He taught His gospel through word and deed as “He walked the roads of Palestine, healing the sick, causing the blind to see, and raising the dead”

All of that, straight from the website.

Basically, to sum it up, Jesus was a man, who became God, he became the messiah.

Look how that is different from what scripture teaches us, and the AC affirms.

God himself became flesh. The holy Spirit overshadowed. Shekinah Glory. Dwelt among us.

SO we have to have Jesus as divine from the beginning. We must Have Jesus as God wrapped in flesh, as the Son of God. as The Incarnate Word.

P2 - Why we need a healthy view of the supernatural. What is it?

And because of this, we have to accept that Miracles exist. There are groups who claim to be Christians but do not believe in the virgin birth. Because they can’t accept the idea of the supernatural.

A few mins ago I referenced the virgin birth as the gateway miracle.

It was said in the commentary as the gateway miracle to the supernatural.

And I think that is a thing that we need to thing about more as Christians, because the danger for us is to say we believe in God, but then not believe in him being all powerful. The Beginning of the AC states, Father Almighty.

We believe in a God that is all power and so we must believe in the supernatural because we believe in a supernatural God, who works supernaturally.

So this implies that we need a healthy view of the supernatural.

We have to allow in our world view miracles. We have to have them. With out the supernatural and miracles, we have no faith, we have nothing to hang on to. Because Christ from the beginning is supernatural. God is supernatural.

That would be like living in this world and not believing in gravity. “I can’t see it, it must not exist!”

you can’t see it, but it sure helps explain some stuff.

Believe it or not, i know we talked about one conspiracy theory already with New Coke, but the grandaddy of all Conspiracy theories, Flat Earth, assumes a world without gravity.

But that is what we do if we don’t allow space in our world view for miracles and supernatural.

Our faith is predicated on the belief in the super natural.

P3 - Without the first miracle we do not have the great miracle. Creation to the Cross. The God Man. Condescended.

And so if we do not believe in the first miracle, we cannot have the great miracle.

With out the virgin birth, without the incarnation as scripture teaches, we cannot have the resurrection.

God is the only one who can raise himself from the dead, because God is the only one who can bring life to the lifeless. from death life.

Jesus is the only one who came back to life and then never died. You have stores of people being raised from the dead, but they all eventually died again. Christ is living and on the throne.

Jesus was not just a man but God himself wrapped in flesh that was born, lived the life we couldn’t and died the death we should have. He didn’t become God, He is God, was God, and will always be God.

SO this is the gospel, this is what I want to invite you in to, the good news that Christ is on the throne.

That God has come and dwelt among us, creating a way for us to have relationship with him.

We broke the relationship in the garden, Christ restored the relationship on the cross, and he is raised from the dead. and he is on the throne, and that is good news for us. That if you place your trust in him, he is faithful to save you form your sin and the wrath you deserve.

P2Christ

So here is what I want to do, I’m going to pray, and then I want us to stand and confess the creed together. And while we are doing that, if you are in here and you aren’t sure if you know Jesus as savior, then I want you come talk to me, talk to one of the adults, talk to someone. Jesus is the only one who can bring a life with an unkillable joy. His yoke is easy, his burden is light. Come see him as Lord, come see him as king.

Y’all Pray with me.

Pray

Y’all say this with me.

I believe in God, the Father almighty,       creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,       who was conceived by the Holy Spirit       and born of the virgin Mary.       He suffered under Pontius Pilate,       was crucified, died, and was buried;       he descended to hell.       The third day he rose again from the dead.       He ascended to heaven       and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.       From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,       the holy catholic* church,       the communion of saints,       the forgiveness of sins,       the resurrection of the body,       and the life everlasting. Amen.