The Good News of the Virgin Birth

Scripture Reading/Prayer

Tonight’s Scripture reading is going to come from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 1:26, which is on page X if you’re using one of the black bibles under your chair. We will be reading through verse 35:

English Standard Version (Chapter 1)

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.

This is God’s Word/thanks be to God

Let us pray: Our Father in Heaven, we thank you and praise you for Jesus Christ. We thank you that you did not send a Savior who could only partially save us, or get the ball rolling for us to pick up and save in our own strength, but you send a Savior that is fully God and fully man and able to fully and completely save us now and forever through his life, death, and resurrection. As we look at the virgin birth tonight I pray that the Holy Spirit would fill our hearts with awe and wonder at the miracle of Christmas, and the miracle of Christ. I ask this in the name of Jesus, Amen.

Introduction

This is the last night of Redeemer Youth for the semester, and the last night of Redeemer Youth for 2021! After tonight, we will not have Redeemer Youth again until January 12th, and so I hope that everyone here has a wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year!

Tonight, as you might expect, we are talking about Christmas and our faith, because that’s just what you do this time of year. I always like this time of year because there are so many different topics and things to talk about that usually only come up this time of year, and some of those things are beautiful and mysterious and wonderful and give us joy and hope amid a usually dark and depressing seasons of the year. But there are also some things that come up during Christmastime that are strange, weird, or difficult to think about and talk about, and I figured that since tonight is the last night of Redeemer Youth for the year and because Andrew gave me free reign to do a sermon on whatever I wanted, we are going to tackle one of the thorniest aspects about our faith that always comes up this time of year: the virgin birth of Jesus Christ.

The doctrine of the Virgin Birth, if you are unfamiliar with it or are fuzzy on what it is, is a historic Christian belief about how Jesus Christ came into this world. The Church has maintained from the very beginning that Mary became pregnant from a miraculous work of the Holy Spirit and that Jesus Christ, though born a human, was born through a miracle that only God could do. We believe that Jesus had a human father named Joseph, but that Joseph was not Jesus’ biological father. We believe that the Virgin Birth is one of the most important truths about who Jesus is because it shows us, from the very beginning of his life, that he was not just an ordinary man, but that he was the Son of God.

This is a truth that Christians have believed about Jesus from the very beginning of the church. The Nicene Creed, one of the most important summaries of our entire faith, says that “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven; he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made human.” Another major creed, the Apostles Creed, says “I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born from the Virgin Mary.” Think about it: when the fathers of our faith were tasked with summarizing the most essential and important truths of Scripture, one of those truths was the claim that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born to a virgin. It may seem really weird to us, but it’s actually a really big deal, and many of the earliest controversies of the church came from denying the Virgin Birth of Christ and it remains really one of the most controversial beliefs that we could believe as Christians today.

But why is this belief so important? Why is believing that Jesus Christ had a supernatural birth so important not only to the story of Christmas, but to the entirety of our faith?

The Gospel in Christmas

Let’s go back to Christmas for a second. What is it that actually makes Christmas so special? What is the good news and the hope that we have because of Christmas? Is it that we are going to get a lot of new stuff that we think will make our hearts happy? It is that we will get a couple weeks off school or go out of town or eat a ton of food?

As Christians, we are able to enjoy giving and receiving gifts to each other and having a season of rest and feasting. These are all good things! But these are not the things that make Christmas special. As Christians, we believe that Christmas is special because we believe the Savior of the World, Jesus Christ, came into this world to give us the greatest gift we could ever receive: salvation from our sin and eternal life with God in a new heavens and a new earth. All of the clothes you’ll get this year will fade away. The new phone or video game console you’ll get will be obsolete in a couple years. You’ll get hungry again after Christmas dinner. But our salvation in Jesus Christ, and the eternal life we will experience with him in a new creation where there is no more pain, suffering, or evil, is a gift that we all secretly long for, and will never fade away. In a sense, as we wait for the second coming of Jesus Christ, we are waiting for the greatest Christmas gift of all time, and a gift that we are able to enjoy right now, in the immediate moment, but won’t experience fully until later.

But here is the thing about Jesus being the savior of the world: Jesus can only be our Savior, if he is actually able to save us from our sins. Think about it: if someone claims to be a Savior but doesn’t have the power to actually legitimately save and deliver us, is that person a Savior? When we talk about placing our faith in Jesus Christ for our salvation in response to the Gospel, we are placing our faith in Jesus not because it is our faith that saves us, but because Jesus can actually save us. It doesn’t matter how much faith a person has in something if the thing a person has faith in can’t actually save them. It doesn’t matter how much faith we have in Jesus Christ, or how deep or strong our faith is, if Jesus is not actually capable of saving us from our sins - and if Jesus can save us from our sins, it means our salvation is not based on how strong or deep our faith is, but because Jesus accomplished our salvation on our behalf.

But how does Jesus save us? How does Jesus actually secure our salvation? If you were here earlier in the year when we went through the book of Colossians, we talked about how Jesus Christ, on the cross, took on himself the punishment we deserved for breaking God’s law. We have sinned against God and the punishment for sinning against God is death, and either we will pay that penalty or someone else who is innocent must take our place. Jesus Christ is the only possible substitute capable of taking our penalty upon himself because he did not have his own penalty to pay - because of his grace and love, he took upon himself a punishment he did not deserve. But Jesus was only able to do this because Jesus was not just a man - Jesus was also fully God and fully man at the same time. This doctrine is known as the Hypostatic Union: in Jesus Christ exists a fully divine nature and a fully human nature. Now we cannot possibly fully wrap our minds around how that is possible - it is a mystery that we believe even if the limitations of our minds cannot fully understand it. But, even if we can’t fully comprehend how Jesus is both fully divine and fully human at the same time, we can point to the moment when it happened: when the Holy Spirit came upon Mary and in her womb the Spirit conceived a baby, whose name would be called Jesus Christ, and whose birth we celebrate at Christmas.

In Christmas we celebrate the birth of a Savior who is able to save us from our sins, and Jesus is able to save us from our sins because he is fully God and fully man, and the doctrine of the virgin birth shows how Jesus is both fully God and fully man. In being conceived by the Holy Spirit, Jesus is fully divine as the Father and the Spirit are divine, which means Jesus shares in the same sinless perfection as the Father and the Spirit. In being born to Mary, Jesus is as fully human as each of us in this room, but also being fully divine, he does not share our sinful nature. In being fully God, Jesus displays the full character of God, and his grace, love, patience, forgiveness, wisdom, justice, and more. In being fully man, Jesus knows - deeply, intimate - what it means to live in a world broken by sin. The book of Hebrews tells us Jesus has been tempted in every respect as we are, but never sinned, and because of this, Jesus is able to represent us before God and present himself before Christ as our Advocate, our Mediator, and our High Priest, whose sinlessness covers us and whose righteousness becomes ours through faith.

We believe the virgin birth not because Christians like to believe weird things. We believe in the virgin birth because the virgin birth is necessary for Jesus to be a Savior that can actually save us. Christmas would not be special or important if just another strong or smart dude was born and died like every other strong or smart dude that’s ever been born and died throughout the history of the world. Christmas would not be special or important if it was a moment or instance of euphoric feel-good emotion, because euphoric feel-good emotions leave us just as quickly as they come (which is part of the reason why this time of the year has the highest suicide rate of the year). Christmas would not be special if we got that “one gift” that we can’t stop obsessing over, because like every other “one gift” that we thought would satisfy us for the rest of our lives, we will get bored with whatever it is or it’ll break and we want something else. No, Christmas is special because in celebrating Christmas, we celebrate a miracle, and a miracle of God’s grace that we do not deserve. Christmas is special because - for the first and only time in history - God became a man not to punish or destroy man, but to save man from sin by living the perfect sinless life we could not live, dying in our place on the cross and taking the penalty we deserved upon himself, and then three days later rising from the dead.

So the next time we sing “The Apostles Creed” here at Redeemer or you hear someone bring up the virgin birth and how it’s really not that important to our faith, I hope you’ll recall that nothing could be further from the truth. Not only is this one of the oldest beliefs of Christians from the very beginning, in this belief we believe that Jesus isn’t just a pretend Savior, or a potential Savior, or an incomplete Savior, but that because he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin named Mary, Jesus is the only Savior, one who has actually accomplished redemption for his people on the cross.