SPEAKER_00: Ministering to the heart of Western Arkansas's River Valley for over 165 years, welcome to Chapter and First, the Bible Teaching Ministry of Fort Smith's First Baptist Church.
SPEAKER_00: You'll find sermons and teachings from Pastor Greg, our ministry staff, and guest speakers.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.
SPEAKER_01: What a beautiful song.
SPEAKER_01: Incredible message.
SPEAKER_01: That image, if you've been in church any amount of time, that image of the Lamb of God, you'll understand what that means.
SPEAKER_01: If not, then that may be a new concept to you.
SPEAKER_01: And when the Bible says that Jesus was the Lamb of God, what he's building is off of that illustration, a running illustration through Scripture.
SPEAKER_01: When God established the promise of Jesus that he would send Jesus as our Savior, he then created a process of how he brought Jesus into the world to be the Savior.
SPEAKER_01: He first established a people, the Israelites, the Jewish nation, and he structured them in such a way to be designed to be his plan to bring the Savior into the world.
SPEAKER_01: He created their form of worship and taught them how to worship him.
SPEAKER_01: And inherent in that process was teaching them about sin and about repentance and that there needed to be a price paid for sin.
SPEAKER_01: And so he established a form of worship where they would take a lamb that was without spot or blemish.
SPEAKER_01: It spoke of someone who was without sin, and they would sacrifice a lamb once a year, that perfect life, the picture of that being sacrificed for the sins of the people.
SPEAKER_01: And that became a prophecy and a picture of who the Messiah would be.
SPEAKER_01: And so when Jesus is described as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, God has been developing that picture all throughout the Old Testament time to point to us Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And what it tells us is that from the very beginning, God's plan was a plan of grace and forgiveness of sins to redeem us from our sins.
SPEAKER_01: And so as we think about Christmas time, this is a perfect time for us to be talking about God's gift of grace.
SPEAKER_01: You see, that's why Jesus came, but it's also why Jesus came in the way that he did.
SPEAKER_01: And as we move into this Christmas season, where we'll see lots of mangers and lots of babies and lots of that everywhere, I want you to really set your mind on the truth of what all of that means.
SPEAKER_01: As we talked about last week as we've begun this Discover Jesus series, we talked about the fact that Christmas and Easter are the first and final chapters of the same story and journey.
SPEAKER_01: You cannot discover who Jesus is outside of the fundamental truth of what happened at Christmas and the fundamental truth of the purpose of the cross and the resurrection at Easter.
SPEAKER_01: And those are inextricably linked.
SPEAKER_01: In effect, Christmas and Easter are the same purpose, the same journey, the same large event.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, Christianity, when we talk about Jesus, is very unique from any other religion that has happened during mankind because no other religion, no other faith, no other heritage of trying to find out who God is and how you are saved, however, you want to describe that journey for humankind, no other version of that faith heritage has ever invested as much in the picture of the birth of its iconic person than Christianity.
SPEAKER_01: You have some random sort of weird things thrown into Greek mythology or some of that, but nobody else has staked such ground on prophesying and identifying the birth of the person who was at the center of that faith heritage, identifying it as factually having occurred, because in no other place do you have a Savior like Jesus who can come and be qualified and powerful enough to pay the price for sin and grant eternal life.
SPEAKER_01: And so the faith and the foundation of faith that is based in the birth of Jesus is integral and foundation to everything we believe about salvation and the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, I want you to turn with me in Luke chapter 1, but I want to give you a scripture.
SPEAKER_01: I just want you to hear it.
SPEAKER_01: You turn to Luke chapter 1, but I want you to hear the words of the Apostle John in 2 John.
SPEAKER_01: Here's what he says.
SPEAKER_01: In verse 7, many deceivers have gone out into the world, and how are they deceivers?
SPEAKER_01: They do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh.
SPEAKER_01: This is the deceiver and the Antichrist.
SPEAKER_01: To deny the miraculous and purposeful birth of the way Jesus was born and who it defines him as the Savior, the Bible says is literally to be a liar and a deceiver.
SPEAKER_01: And so it's important that we take this time, even though it seems a little fundamental, it is very fundamental to who we are.
SPEAKER_01: And Scripture warns us that those who would deny the coming of Jesus in the flesh and how it happened and how it qualifies him as our Savior are literally liars and deceivers drawing people away from the true gospel of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Let's look in Luke chapter 1 and look at the part now where the angel comes to Mary.
SPEAKER_01: And this is the story, and again, it's familiar to us, but it's important that we delve into these things and we affirm our understanding of the birth of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: In verse 26, the Bible says, in the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man named Joseph of the house of David.
SPEAKER_01: The virgin's name was Mary.
SPEAKER_01: And the angel came to her and said, Rejoice, favored woman, the Lord is with you.
SPEAKER_01: But she was deeply troubled by this statement, wondering what kind of greeting this could be.
SPEAKER_01: Then the angel told her, Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God.
SPEAKER_01: And that word favor could also be translated the word grace.
SPEAKER_01: For you have found grace with God.
SPEAKER_01: And all throughout, an understanding of who Jesus is as our Savior, it is all the principle of God's grace.
SPEAKER_01: He sent Jesus because of his grace to establish salvation.
SPEAKER_01: Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found grace with God.
SPEAKER_01: Now listen, you will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will call him Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High.
SPEAKER_01: And the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David.
SPEAKER_01: He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will have no end.
SPEAKER_01: Mary asked the angel, How can this be, since I have not been intimate with a man?
SPEAKER_01: And the angel replied to her, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God.
SPEAKER_01: And consider your relative Elizabeth, even she has conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her who is called childless, for nothing will be impossible with God.
SPEAKER_01: And Mary responds in obedience and says, I am the Lord's slave.
SPEAKER_01: May it be done to me according to your word.
SPEAKER_01: Then the angel left her.
SPEAKER_01: Now here's what I want you to see, and I want two truths that I want you to think about as we unpack this story again of Jesus coming.
SPEAKER_01: Two things I want you to reflect about, and I hope you can take these with you through the Christmas season the next week.
SPEAKER_01: First of all, Jesus came for the sole purpose of accomplishing salvation as a result of God's grace.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible says in Ephesians chapter 2, for by grace are you saved through faith.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus came for the sole purpose, God's intentional design to create a means to pay the price for our sins so our sins could be forgiven, so we would not be under the judgment of those sins, and so that we could spend an eternity in his presence, redeemed back to be in relationship with him.
SPEAKER_01: You see, all of us are sinners by birth, by nature, and by choice.
SPEAKER_01: Sin entered into the world through Adam.
SPEAKER_01: All of us are born with that sin nature.
SPEAKER_01: All of us have done things we know that are wrong, and the Bible calls that sin, and sin must be punished.
SPEAKER_01: A holy God cannot allow sin to exist or be into his presence, and so he punishes sin.
SPEAKER_01: But Jesus was the promise of God to forgive sin.
SPEAKER_01: As we talked about last week, from the very moment of human sin, God stepped in with his desire and his plan to forgive our sins by sending Jesus to be the Lamb of God, as the choir sang about.
SPEAKER_01: And so Jesus' sole purpose and coming, all of it is wrapped into the truth of He came to accomplish God's gracious forgiveness of sin.
SPEAKER_01: And you can never understand or discover who Jesus is outside of that purpose.
SPEAKER_01: But here's the second thing I want you to see today: the means of Jesus coming, how God accomplished bringing the Savior into the world reflects the same truth of grace as Jesus coming itself.
SPEAKER_01: When we talk about Jesus comes, sometimes we look just to that moment when Jesus came.
SPEAKER_01: And we understand that Jesus came and that he did that for us.
SPEAKER_01: But what's incredible that Scripture teaches us is that God's design has been to forgive and grace from the very beginning.
SPEAKER_01: In the way that he unfolds the bringing of Jesus, shows his grace and his desire that Jesus would be our Savior.
SPEAKER_01: And so he is trying to teach us through the process and the means of bringing Jesus into the world why he was sending Jesus to be our Savior.
SPEAKER_01: And so, in all of these moments, in all of these patterns, in all of these plans that God creates to bring about bringing Jesus, he is showing his grace fully throughout that, every bit as much as he shows his grace in the sending of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Let me try to illustrate that from a few things in this passage of Scripture here.
SPEAKER_01: The first is that the lineage of Jesus clearly shows God's gracious purpose.
SPEAKER_01: God unfolded this person, had this person, who had this person, who had this person, who had this person for generation after generation after generation after generation, through the Jewish people, then through a family, and then through a line, and then Jesus is born to Mary.
SPEAKER_01: In the lineage of David, in the lineage of Jesus, we see an incredible amount of truths that are pointing to God's grace and purpose in sending a Savior.
SPEAKER_01: First of all, as he speaks to Mary here in this passage of Scripture, it makes very clear this idea.
SPEAKER_01: It says, gives us the facts that Gabriel was sent to a town in Galilee called Nazareth to a virgin engaged to a man named Joseph of the house of David.
SPEAKER_01: You see, the way God unfolded the bringing of salvation, he gave a promise after the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve sinned.
SPEAKER_01: We looked at that last week.
SPEAKER_01: God said, I'm going to send you a savior.
SPEAKER_01: And then over time, he began to unfold that plan.
SPEAKER_01: And he had a man named Abraham, and he gave a promise to him if you will be obedient and follow me, I will make you a great nation.
SPEAKER_01: And through your line and the nation that we create, I promise that I will bring a savior.
SPEAKER_01: And so he gave a covenant to Abraham.
SPEAKER_01: And then you have Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the establishment of the Jewish people.
SPEAKER_01: And through the Jewish people and the Jewish nation, God shows and reveals he's going to bring his Savior through them.
SPEAKER_01: And then there is a king that is raised.
SPEAKER_01: His name is David, and you understand King David, and God re-establishes a covenant with David.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to use your line to bring the Savior into the world.
SPEAKER_01: My Savior will come through your line.
SPEAKER_01: And so here in the lineage of Jesus, we see specifically God is identifying Jesus as his Savior by saying, He is coming exactly the way I said he would.
SPEAKER_01: He is coming through the line of David.
SPEAKER_01: Now, you have two places where you're will give be given lineage, and it's important because the angel tells Mary, and she understands as a Jewish young lady exactly what's happening.
SPEAKER_01: When the angel says he will be, in verse 32, he will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord will give him the throne of his father David.
SPEAKER_01: He will reign over the house of Jacob forever.
SPEAKER_01: She understands.
SPEAKER_01: This angel is telling me that I am going to give birth to the Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: That's who this is.
SPEAKER_01: This is the person, the Redeemer, the Messiah that God has promised and He has identified Him as being through the line of David.
SPEAKER_01: Now you have two places in Scripture where the lineage of Jesus is given.
SPEAKER_01: Now you have to understand in Jewish culture that lineage was vitally important.
SPEAKER_01: They spent an incredible amount of time tracking and keeping their lineage.
SPEAKER_01: Now that hadn't been that culture in America.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, we didn't do that for so long.
SPEAKER_01: Now there's businesses and places you can go, and people are getting interested in trying to find their lineage and trace it all the way back as best they can.
SPEAKER_01: The Jewish nation never lost that.
SPEAKER_01: It was vital to them because what happened is their structure of inheritance and passing things on and all of that was all designed through lineage.
SPEAKER_01: It was all designed through understanding who your family was, who the firstborn was, where you came from, and all of that.
SPEAKER_01: Lineage was vital because in order to be a king, you had to come from that line of kings.
SPEAKER_01: In order to be a priest, you had to have a lineage that was established through the tribe of Levi, one of the twelve tribes of the nation of Israel.
SPEAKER_01: And so lineage was vitally important.
SPEAKER_01: In Jesus being identified, the Savior will be of the line and lineage of David.
SPEAKER_01: It was vital that that lineage be clear to identify him as the Savior and to show God faithful to meet that promise.
SPEAKER_01: And so what you have two places in Scripture where you have Jesus' lineage established.
SPEAKER_01: You have in the book of Matthew, you have at the beginning of the book of Matthew, the lineage of David.
SPEAKER_01: Now, Matthew was written with a particular purpose.
SPEAKER_01: It was written to identify the Savior to the Jewish people and to evangelize the Jewish people.
SPEAKER_01: And so it was written from a perspective of explaining that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: And so what you have there is the lineage of David through the line of Joseph.
SPEAKER_01: And you have, it begins from the time of Abraham because he is the father of the Jewish nation, as God established that.
SPEAKER_01: It is that first covenant to use the Jewish people to bring the Savior into the world.
SPEAKER_01: And he gives the paternal lineage of Jesus through the line of Joseph's family.
SPEAKER_01: In Luke chapter 3, you have another lineage of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And if you look at it, the names in some places are different, and the names down in the beginning generations are the same.
SPEAKER_01: Why is that?
SPEAKER_01: In the book of Luke, which was written as a definitive, orderly, time, chronological, factual history of the life of Jesus that was written to affirm to the world that Jesus is the Savior of the world.
SPEAKER_01: What you have there in the book of Luke is the lineage of Jesus through his mother's line, through Mary's family and line.
SPEAKER_01: And what you do is you find and you trace back Joseph's lineage went through the line of David and the house of David with one son, and Mary's lineage goes down and traces back to another son of David.
SPEAKER_01: And so if you will look at it from both the mother and the father lines, Jesus is entitled to the title of King of the Jews, and he fulfills in both of his parents the promise that the Messiah would come through the throne or the line of David, through the covenant that was given to David, that he would be the one who brings his line would be the one who brings the Savior into the world.
SPEAKER_01: It's an incredible picture.
SPEAKER_01: But then you have another truth that's even more fascinating.
SPEAKER_01: The breadth of people and circumstances in the line, the people who are included in the line and lineage of Jesus, they show that God has intended him graciously to be a savior.
SPEAKER_01: Now you think if he's going to bring Jesus into the world, if he's going to identify Jesus as the Savior, if I were doing it, I would pick the best families in the world with the greatest testimonies and all the greatest pictures, and I would make that as pure as I possibly could.
SPEAKER_01: Wouldn't that make sense?
SPEAKER_01: But that's not what God did, because his design is to show us what we looked at last week in John 3.16.
SPEAKER_01: For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whosoever believes in him would never perish but have everlasting life.
SPEAKER_01: And so he includes in his line this incredibly expansive story of people from all kinds of races and backgrounds.
SPEAKER_01: People who were great people, but people who were also deeply flawed sinners.
SPEAKER_01: And yet they are included in the lineage of Jesus for God to make the point that everyone, everyone, Jesus came for to save.
SPEAKER_01: Just give you a couple of examples.
SPEAKER_01: There is a person who's famous, you've heard of.
SPEAKER_01: Her name is Rahab.
SPEAKER_01: And she is included in the line of the lineage of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Who was Rahab?
SPEAKER_01: Just to remind you, if you go to the book of Joshua, when you find the children of Israel have come out of bondage in Egypt, they've wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, letting a generation that didn't have the faith to go into the land of Canaan die off, and then Moses dies and Joshua becomes the leader, and God brings them back to the land of Canaan, and he's about to send them in to conquer the land of Canaan, which will be the land that we now refer to as Israel in modern-day life, the place where the Jewish people would become that nation that God would use to bring the Savior in.
SPEAKER_01: The first place that they come to in conquering the land of Canaan is a city called Jericho.
SPEAKER_01: It is a fortress city on the main road that intersects Israel, the land of Israel, or the land of Canaan at that time.
SPEAKER_01: And so it is the first place they have to come to.
SPEAKER_01: And you remember the story of God told them to walk around the walls seven times and all of that, and he brought the walls down.
SPEAKER_01: In preparation for that, he sent some spies into the land.
SPEAKER_01: They go into Jericho, and a Gentile woman in the nation, people, nation state there in Canaan of Jericho, that were pagans that worshipped evil gods in horrible ways, she, the Bible says, even was a prostitute.
SPEAKER_01: She hides these spies and protects them from the sheriff and those who would try to take them and kill them as Israeli spies.
SPEAKER_01: And she hides them and then helps them escape so that they can go back and make their report to Joshua and the people come.
SPEAKER_01: And they conquer the land, they conquer the city of Jericho.
SPEAKER_01: Rahab then said, I know and trust that the God of Israel is the one true God.
SPEAKER_01: That's why she hid them, that's why she helped them.
SPEAKER_01: And she pled with them, please remember me when you come in and conquer Jericho.
SPEAKER_01: They told her, the armies of God will remember you and honor your effort in helping us if you will hang a scarlet cord in the window of your home.
SPEAKER_01: And as they went through conquering that city of Jericho, when they came to her house and they saw that scarlet cord that was there, they knew from their pre-battle briefings that was Rahab.
SPEAKER_01: She was the one that placed her faith in Jehovah God.
SPEAKER_01: And she is the one who has said she believes that our God is the one true God, and she is the one who's hid our spies.
SPEAKER_01: And so they rescue her and her family and they take her into the Jewish people.
SPEAKER_01: She marries a Jewish man and becomes a part of the line of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: It's an incredible picture.
SPEAKER_01: It's one of my mother's favorite pictures in Scripture, and we talk about it every Christmas.
SPEAKER_01: It is a picture that Jesus was being sent as the Savior, but all along the way, God is identifying that He loves you and that He is coming to forgive sin and He is reaching out to everyone to give them a chance to come into redemption.
SPEAKER_01: And so she is brought into the wine, and she is brought into that for the purpose of showing us God's grace.
SPEAKER_01: You have another woman who's famous, uh, Ruth.
SPEAKER_01: There's a short book about this woman in the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: We think of that as a great love story.
SPEAKER_01: Ruth's husband died, and she's a young widow, and she's there in Israel, and Boaz redeems her and this whole romantic thing.
SPEAKER_01: But we don't think about how we got to the story of Ruth.
SPEAKER_01: The way we get to the story of Ruth is Jewish people are under the Jewish law, and the Jewish law makes it a sin to marry outside the Jewish faith.
SPEAKER_01: All throughout the Old Testament, there were numbers of times when God tells them, do not marry outside the Jewish faith.
SPEAKER_01: It is a sin to do that.
SPEAKER_01: Do not bring the false gods of those false religions into the Jewish people.
SPEAKER_01: When they are going into the land of Israel, Joshua and the leaders, God warns them multiple times.
SPEAKER_01: When you get into the land of Canaan, do not intermarry with the pagan religions and the pagan people that live in that land.
SPEAKER_01: You are to conquer them and drive them out.
SPEAKER_01: We are establishing a pure picture of Jesus who had come to accomplish God's purpose of bringing the Savior into the world.
SPEAKER_01: There's a man and a woman who are Jewish man and a woman, and they move outside of that area where the Jews are living.
SPEAKER_01: They move into the land of the Moabites.
SPEAKER_01: And if you do any study in the Old Testament, they are some of the worst and most vile pagans in all of the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: They are one of the most rotten enemies of the people of Israel.
SPEAKER_01: This Jewish man and his wife, they have two sons, and they take them into a pagan city, and those two sons marry pagan Moabite daughters.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, these are terrible examples of the Jewish people, disobedient to God's Jewish laws.
SPEAKER_01: They marry outside of the Jewish faith, they marry these pagan women, and one of them is named Ruth.
SPEAKER_01: She's a Moabitus.
SPEAKER_01: And so what happens is the two husbands die, the father-in-law dies, the two sons die, the mother is left as a widow, the two daughter-in-laws are left as widows, and the mother goes into depression and says, Listen, I'm just gonna go home and maybe somebody there will take care of me.
SPEAKER_01: You two girls are from here, y'all just stay here.
SPEAKER_01: And Ruth speaks to her mother-in-law and says, Nope, even through your, she doesn't say it this way, but even through your bad example of being a Jewish follower, I have discovered that your God is the true God.
SPEAKER_01: And she says, Wherever you go, I will go, and your God will be my God.
SPEAKER_01: And she follows Naomi back to Israel and then begins the love story where Boaz marries her, and it is an incredible picture of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, the process that he marries her is called the kinsman redeemer process.
SPEAKER_01: I don't have time to go into it, but even in this very name, you understand it's a picture of Jesus because he is the Redeemer.
SPEAKER_01: Another pagan woman, another person outside the Jewish faith, another person that you would never think would taint the line of Jesus, and yet God brings them into the line to show us that God so loved the world that he gave his only son.
SPEAKER_01: That whosoever believes in him will never perish, but have everlasting life.
SPEAKER_01: And so, even in how God accomplishes it, he identifies his gracious purpose.
SPEAKER_01: Second thing, the miraculous nature of Jesus' conception shows God's gracious purpose.
SPEAKER_01: Again, if you'll look at it, here's what he says.
SPEAKER_01: Twice he says virgin and specifies her as someone who is a virgin.
SPEAKER_01: The third reference you have, how can this be since I've not been intimate with a man?
SPEAKER_01: God is making clear from the prophecy to Mary in the book of Luke.
SPEAKER_01: He is factually establishing the history that this is how Jesus was born.
SPEAKER_01: She says, I don't understand how this is going to happen.
SPEAKER_01: And God says, You have found grace, and through that grace to you, I am going to use you to graciously bring a Savior.
SPEAKER_01: And then He makes this very clear explanation to her.
SPEAKER_01: In other words, she was miraculously made pregnant and given the opportunity to bear a child.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, because he is not born through the biological process and all of that, because he is born miraculously by the work of the Holy Spirit, the Holy One to be born, will be called the Son of God.
SPEAKER_01: The Son of God.
SPEAKER_01: He is not actually Joseph's son.
SPEAKER_01: He is not actually born in the way that you and I were.
SPEAKER_01: Why?
SPEAKER_01: Because through the biological process of mother and father and child, and they get married, and mother, father, and child, and all of that, the sin nature is passed out.
SPEAKER_01: And we talked about that in detail last week, but I want you to show you why.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible even affirms in the lineage of Mary in Luke chapter 3, it begins this way, uh, in um in verse 23.
SPEAKER_01: As he began his ministry, Jesus was about 30 years old and was thought to be the son of Joseph.
SPEAKER_01: You get that?
SPEAKER_01: He's making it very clear.
SPEAKER_01: He is going through the line of Mary, but the way that you would state that in Jewish culture was through the fathers.
SPEAKER_01: And so what he does is to keep that pattern of how Jews would say their lineage, but he makes very clear that Jesus was not the son of Joseph.
SPEAKER_01: He was thought to be the son of Joseph because he's actually the son of God.
SPEAKER_01: Why does that matter?
SPEAKER_01: Because in order for Jesus to be the Savior, first of all, he had to be a human.
SPEAKER_01: For the wages of sin is death, and a human must die for human sin.
SPEAKER_01: And so a savior would have to be a human.
SPEAKER_01: But you have to have a human who can live a sinless life, one who can carry that burden, who can fight the temptation, who can live sinlessly and then go to the cross and conquer death and sin and author new life through salvation.
SPEAKER_01: And so the Bible makes it clear that Jesus was human as born through Mary, but he is the Son of God conceived by the work of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: Often in church life, we use this phrase: he was the God man.
SPEAKER_01: He was fully God and fully man.
SPEAKER_01: Now that's not some strange concoction that theologians somewhere have made up to try to make this miracle make sense.
SPEAKER_01: It is not that at all.
SPEAKER_01: It is taught throughout Scripture and is fundamental to our belief.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus was God and he was man.
SPEAKER_01: He was not half man and half God.
SPEAKER_01: He was all man so that he could die for our sins and he was all God so we could have the power and the ability to do that.
SPEAKER_01: It is mind-boggling, it is a miracle, but it is a biblical truth.
SPEAKER_01: Here's what the Bible tells us.
SPEAKER_01: Over and over, it gives us pictures of this.
SPEAKER_01: Let me just give you a couple of scriptures real quickly.
SPEAKER_01: First of all, in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, the Bible says this.
SPEAKER_01: But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
SPEAKER_01: For since death came through a man, Adam, Adam sinned, Eve sinned through them, the line of sin, the resurrection of the dead also comes through a man.
SPEAKER_01: For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.
SPEAKER_01: So Jesus, as he dies for our sins, and then is resurrected, and we place our faith in him, his death as a human man, his shed blood plays the price for our sin.
SPEAKER_01: Let me give you a couple of other scriptures.
SPEAKER_01: Just write these references down.
SPEAKER_01: 1 Timothy chapter 2, verse 5.
SPEAKER_01: 1 Timothy 2, verse 5.
SPEAKER_01: For there is one God and one mediator between God and humanity, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all.
SPEAKER_01: Galatians chapter 4, verses 4 and 5.
SPEAKER_01: When the time came for completion, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.
SPEAKER_01: How did he redeem us?
SPEAKER_01: He was born under the law, and where the law points out that all of us are sinners, Jesus did not sin, and so he could die and be pay the price for our sins.
SPEAKER_01: Colossians chapter 1, verses 19 and 20.
SPEAKER_01: For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Jesus, and through Jesus to reconcile everything to himself by making peace through the blood of his cross, whether things on earth or things in heaven.
SPEAKER_01: So what the Bible says is the fullness of God was in the person of Jesus, and yet he shed human blood on the cross.
SPEAKER_01: Let me show you this last patch of scripture on the screen.
SPEAKER_01: Hebrews chapter 2 explains it this way.
SPEAKER_01: Now, since the children have flesh and blood in common, all of us are human, flesh and blood, Jesus also shared in these, so that through his death he might destroy the one holding the power of death, that is the devil, and free those who were held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death.
SPEAKER_01: In other words, we are slaves to the fear of death and to death because of our sin.
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus became a person, a human, so that he could die for our sins.
SPEAKER_01: For it is clear that he does not reach out to help angels, but to help Abraham's offspring, to help humans, to help people, to help us.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, he had to be like his brothers in every way, so that he could become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God to make payment for the sins of the people.
SPEAKER_01: God sent Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: He himself was tested and suffered, so he is able to help those who are tested.
SPEAKER_01: In other words, the things and the temptations and the tests and the struggles that result in our sin, that cause us to sin, the temptations that we follow and fall into and we fail into so that we become sinners, Jesus went through all of those experiences as a person.
SPEAKER_01: He became all man so he could go through all of those, so he could then die on the cross for us.
SPEAKER_01: He could pay the price for all of those sins, all of those failures, all of those struggles that we have.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus did that for us.
SPEAKER_01: And when you look at that baby who was born, you need to immediately be reminded that Jesus came for you for a purpose so that he could die in our place.
SPEAKER_01: That baby is human and would go through everything that we go through and do it perfectly because he was also the fullness of the person of God and the person of Jesus with the power to walk through life, to conquer life in sin, to die as a substitute for our sins and to raise again, offering us new life.
SPEAKER_01: All throughout this process of the birth, we see God's grace.
SPEAKER_01: Here's the final thing as we close this morning.
SPEAKER_01: I want you to see this that God identifies his gracious purpose in personal and specific ways.
SPEAKER_01: We are not having it may seem a little bit like a theology class, or it may seem a little bit like a Bible class today.
SPEAKER_01: But this is not a philosophy, it's not a religion class, these are not principles that are high and elevated up here.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus did all of this for each and every person who ever hears the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus did this for you.
SPEAKER_01: For God so loved the world.
SPEAKER_01: But just as Gary Thomas said in that song, yes, he died for the world, but he died for each and every person in the world.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus was identified so that every individual who reads this scripture, every individual who has a follower of who is a follower of Jesus Christ, who brings that gospel into their lives, who shares Jesus with them, every one of those times, it is God intervening in a person's life to tell them I love you and Jesus died for you.
SPEAKER_01: Again, in the process of how God accomplished bringing Jesus, he illustrates his grace, including that he speaks in personal and specific ways.
SPEAKER_01: Now, what is this stuff about?
SPEAKER_01: Consider your relative Elizabeth.
SPEAKER_01: You know the story, you understand that Elizabeth and her husband, who was a priest, were old and well past the childbearing age.
SPEAKER_01: And an angel shows up to the husband and says, You and your elderly wife are going to miraculously have a son, and he is going to be the prophet that points out the person of the Messiah who comes.
SPEAKER_01: And this prophet, this preacher, is a prophecy to identify Jesus as the Savior.
SPEAKER_01: And so God is prophesied in the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: There would be what he calls a forerunner, or a prophet who comes to identify the Savior.
SPEAKER_01: And he comes to Zechariah and Elizabeth and he says, Your son is going to be that person, and I'm going to give you this miraculous birth.
SPEAKER_01: Well, it turns out that God uses a cousin of Mary.
SPEAKER_01: Why?
SPEAKER_01: God didn't have to do it that way.
SPEAKER_01: There's no prophecy that the prophet would be miraculously born.
SPEAKER_01: But God understood as he's giving this grace into Mary's life, that it's shocking to come up to a young lady and say you're going to be pregnant by the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: It's incredible for her to realize nobody's going to believe me.
SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine, dads, you have your teenage daughter come home and she tells you it wasn't the boyfriend, it was the Holy Spirit?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, seriously, can you imagine that?
SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine someone who visits our church and they're asking for needs and they're in trouble, or they go to our first choices partner down the street on Grand Avenue and they say, Listen, I'm going to have this baby and I don't know how this happened.
SPEAKER_01: The Holy Spirit did this to me.
SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine?
SPEAKER_01: Is anybody gonna believe that story?
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: And so Mary is not only thinking, I don't believe this story.
SPEAKER_01: How in the world are my parents gonna believe this story?
SPEAKER_01: How am I gonna, how am I gonna process all of this?
SPEAKER_01: Her mind is immediately running.
SPEAKER_01: Man, it shows up when you're pregnant.
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of obvious.
SPEAKER_01: Everybody's gonna know I'm not married.
SPEAKER_01: So they're either gonna think that Joseph and I are living in sin or I'm running around.
SPEAKER_01: How's this gonna work?
SPEAKER_01: God understands in his grace that she's going to need encouragement in this journey.
SPEAKER_01: And so what God does is he miraculously selects a cousin, a cousin, and he uses a process to bring a miracle birth into life to fulfill that prophecy and connect it to the person of Jesus, but also connect this family to Mary.
SPEAKER_01: And he says, Mary, listen, your cousin Elizabeth is now pregnant with a child.
SPEAKER_01: She's thinking, Elizabeth?
SPEAKER_01: She's like 87.
SPEAKER_01: How does that work?
SPEAKER_01: That's as strange as telling me I'm gonna have a child.
SPEAKER_01: And the angel says, That's the point.
SPEAKER_01: Consider your cousin.
SPEAKER_01: God's already done something miraculously to encourage you, to walk alongside you, to affirm the truth of the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: Mary, I need you to know personally, individually, that I love you and you are in my grace, and this is a part of the process.
SPEAKER_01: And so God steps into her life and creates in his macro plan of being a savior the minuscule detail of bringing truth and encouragement into her life.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, I believe you see that all throughout Mary's life.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible says you have found favor with God.
SPEAKER_01: Imagine the stress of the journey of being the mother of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Imagine the stress of living with the gossips, saying, Yeah, they told that like virgin story or whatever, but we all know that's not true.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, the Bible says that in Jesus' life and in Mary's life later on, the town where they were raised, they never gave up the story and they always gossiped about them, about Jesus being born in sin by a mother who was a sinner.
SPEAKER_01: And yet she walked that journey with Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: You think about the fact that as Jesus is learning and he's beginning to study scripture and they study God's word together, and Mary and Joseph are having family devotion time, and they come to Psalm 22 that we mentioned last week, and they begin to read Psalm 22, and they are reminded of all of the crucifixions that they've seen up and down the road in every highway that they've ever taken.
SPEAKER_01: And they begin to read Psalm 22, and Jesus, as a teenager, begins to unpack that scripture, and his mother has to sit there and watch the light bulbs go off in his life, that that's going to happen to me.
SPEAKER_01: What I am seeing is where I am headed, and the mother's heart to have to grow him through that process and pastor him and encourage him and parent him through all of that in her own heart, knowing that my child that I gave birth to, that God gave me, that I nursed, is going to hang on that cross and die in that way.
SPEAKER_01: God encouraged her because he knew she would need it.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, when you think about the grace God's given to Mary, if you go read the story of a group of ladies who had prepared Jesus' body when he came off the cross and they took him and they buried him quickly without finishing the process in a borrowed tomb.
SPEAKER_01: On what we celebrate as Easter, that same group of women, they came to that tomb, and I believe Mary was in that group of women, and they are there, and they walk up to that empty tomb, and God is with Mary in that moment, giving her that grace that she is in the first group that sees that Jesus was raised from the dead, and that he conquered death and sin, and that God was true to his promise, and his grace was powerful and personal and specific in her.
SPEAKER_01: Life.
SPEAKER_01: God speaks and moves specifically in the hearts and the lives of individuals.
SPEAKER_01: God puts you in a spot where you can hear the story of Jesus so that you will know I'm speaking to you.
SPEAKER_01: The Holy Spirit convicts of sin and speaks of the truth of Scripture.
SPEAKER_01: He speaks to your heart and he engages you because he loves you as an individual.
SPEAKER_01: Sitting in this room, there are people that God is speaking to you directly, watching on television, the internet.
SPEAKER_01: Why do you think you're here?
SPEAKER_01: Why in this moment are you in this place?
SPEAKER_01: Because God loves you and He is speaking to you.
SPEAKER_01: It has nothing to do with me, it has nothing to do with First Baptist, it has nothing to do with our choir.
SPEAKER_01: You are here hearing this message because God is intervening personally in your life with the gospel to tell you that he loves you.
SPEAKER_01: You're just making that up, preacher.
SPEAKER_01: And why would he do that in Mary's life?
SPEAKER_01: Why would he orchestrate the whole process to encourage a young girl?
SPEAKER_01: I have given you grace.
SPEAKER_01: I love you.
SPEAKER_01: And yes, the Savior is for the world, but the Savior is for you.
SPEAKER_01: And this morning I want to encourage you.
SPEAKER_01: When you see that baby, I want you to know it is the accomplishment of God's grace for you.
SPEAKER_01: For you.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus loves you.
SPEAKER_01: He came and he died for you.
SPEAKER_01: He was qualified to die for you.
SPEAKER_01: He was powerful to die for you.
SPEAKER_01: He was identified specifically as the Savior.
SPEAKER_01: If you have never trusted Christ as your Savior, whether you're watching online or by television or you're here in the room, I want to invite you to respond to God's specific statement to you.
SPEAKER_01: Whatever He is telling you this morning.
SPEAKER_01: If you've never been saved, He is inviting you to give your life to Him, to trust Jesus as your personal Savior.
SPEAKER_01: You're not becoming a Baptist when you give your life to Christ or anything else.
SPEAKER_01: You are entering into a relationship where God loves you personally and Jesus died for you.
SPEAKER_01: If you're already saved, but maybe you're struggling or have a question in life or doubts or whatever, and you are reminded that Jesus died for you, and he is involved in your life individually.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to pray, and God's people are going to stand and sing.
SPEAKER_01: And if you need Jesus, we're going to invite you to come.
SPEAKER_01: We have ministers at our house.
SPEAKER_01: They're here to pray with you, answer your questions.
SPEAKER_01: We want you to know that Jesus loves you.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, we thank you for the incredible truths in your word, and just there's so much we can't even begin to plumb all the depths of it.
SPEAKER_01: But what we can clearly see in every piece and facet of it is that you love individuals, and Jesus died for people.
SPEAKER_01: And if there's someone this morning who has heard your voice and want to be saved, I pray, Father, this morning they'll give their life to you.
SPEAKER_01: Give them the faith and the freedom to trust Jesus as their personal Savior.
SPEAKER_01: It is in Jesus' name that we pray, and all God's people said.
SPEAKER_00: We pray this message has been a blessing to you and helped to strengthen your walk with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Please know we want to minister to you and pray for you.
SPEAKER_00: Send an email to contact us at fsfbc.org and let us pray for you and help you in any way we can.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to Chapter and First, the Bible Teaching Ministry of Fort Smith's First Baptist Church.