Good morning Church family,
I enjoyed a stellar Christmas service with you yesterday. I really appreciated the choir’s music. It helped me worship our King. I just read this morning from Psalm 100, “Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth! Serve the LORD with gladness! Come into His presence with singing!”
And the choir certainly helped me with that. We all entered into God’s presence with singing!
And I hope I helped you enter into God’s presence with preaching, too! My favorite part of the Christmas story was Luke 1:37, “for nothing will be impossible with God.” And while that applied to the virgin birth of Mary and barren birth of Elizabeth, it certainly was written down for us too, because “nothing” covers everything. It means nothing, even more than just 2 miraculous births, is impossible with God.
That encouraged me and I hope encouraged you too. Whatever your situation is today, don’t count God out, for He is a marvelous Savior in the midst of impossible odds!
One of the connections I wanted to make in my sermon between Mary’s impossible situation and ours was by comparing the beginning of Luke to the end of it (which I neglected to point out. That’s how sermons sometimes go. I want to say something but lack the opportunity).
In the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, Mary is “overshadowed by the power of the Most High” (1:35) which results in the virgin birth of Jesus.
At the end of Luke, Luke 24:49, Jesus tells His disciples: “And behold I am sending the promise of my Father upon you, but stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.”
You have the same language used on the disciples as was used for Mary. Mary was overshadowed by the power of the Most High and the disciples would be clothed with the power from on high.
The Holy Spirit would come to dwell in the disciples and every other person who professed faith in Christ (Acts 2), and this would lead to new birth and regeneration where God’s people would become “new creatures in Christ” (2 Cor. 5:17).
So you can see that the Holy Spirit produces something that is impossible for man, but possible with God, for not only Mary, but us too. God still performs the impossible, today
He really changes lives, today. He still transforms old sinners who loved doing wrong and turns them into saints who love obeying Jesus. This is the work of the Spirit, and it can be described as “for nothing will be impossible with God!” (Or applied to Salvation, Luke 18:27 says, “what is impossible with man is possible with God.”)
What I’m trying to say is that the same power of God exhibited in the Christmas story is still at work today in us.
The same Holy Spirit that produced Jesus is doing a work in us to create supernatural results that would be impossible if just left to us…BECAUSE “nothing will be impossible with God.”
This truth pumped up my spirit, this week, because the Christmas story is not stuck and tucked away in antiquity; it’s still alive today because the same God Who directed the birth of Christ is directing our story today.
One more thing: I don’t think I was able to emphasize as I would have liked to emphasize the importance of Jesus Christ being born in impossible fashion in order to reign “forevermore” and “without end” (1:33). That too, is something that is impossible with man, but only possible with God because everything that we see dies, and every nation switches rulers because death prohibits any kind of eternal nature to any kingdom. So according to the life that we see functioning under human beings, nothing lasts forever! Even scientists will tell you that physical laws of the universe exist that erode everything that exists (the 2nd law of thermodynamics). That is to say, for Christ to reign forever, must be impossible. It would be impossible for us; it is certainly impossible according to the natural laws of the universe, but not for God.
God is God, and one of the things that makes Him God is that He can do whatever He pleases (Psalm 115:3). He can make everything out of nothing. And we are told that He will do that again. He will create peace; He will give us new bodies; He will extinguish evil and sin; He will purge all darkness (See Revelation 22), and He will create a Kingdom without end!
And we can have assurance & certainty of this (as Luke’s purpose is in writing—Luke 1:4) because Jesus was born of a virgin, lived a perfect life and yet was crucified as criminal, rose from the dead, and ascended up to heaven. All of that is simply impossible for man because the whole life of Jesus was impossible by human standards from beginning to end. God never stopped showing that nothing was impossible for Him as He demonstrated in the life of Jesus, through His perfection, His miracles, His Words, His death, His resurrection, and now we await for His second coming.
And as I sought to show you yesterday, all of Christ’s impossible life was couched in history, rooted in Old Testament prophecies, genealogies and genetics, and it’s all recorded that way so that we can have certainty that our faith is real, and true, and our faith is leaning on a true & real future where Jesus reigns forever, and us with Him, with no more death, no more tears, and no more fear. And all of this is vouchsafed on the birth of Christ. God started something that is still reverberating and growing in world history today and even in our life today—God doing unfathomable and impossible things by our standards. And that’s one thing that makes God, God!
So take heart, WOL Chapel, and believe with certainty that God still works in impossible manners today by granting new birth to people through the Holy Spirit, and by raising the dead to life. We base this on the history of Christ’s life, a figure and our Savior with roots in reality. We have real faith and real certainty based on the historical, yet impossible (by man’s standards) life of Jesus!
Merry Christmas! May you ponder our God of the impossible and lean on Him as refuge, a very present help in trouble. May improbably odds never trump our God of the impossible!
With love in Christ,
Aaron
