The Child to Be Born (Luke 1:26-38)

Big Idea: God has acted through a miraculous birth to save humble people.

Take an honest look around you, and you will see a world full of problems.

• A respite center is opening a block away from here. I’m glad that the city is opening this site, but I really wish it wasn’t necessary.
• I’ve attended two funerals of relatively young people who’ve died from cancer this year. That’s two funerals too many.
• I know people — some of whom are in this church — who are going through really difficult times in their lives.

The question is: what is the solution to this world full of problems?

According to the Bible, the answer to this question is surprising. I have to warn you: it will probably bother you. In today’s passage we discover that God has acted through a miraculous birth to save humble people. Every part of that is going to bother us.

Let’s break it down and look at what this passage says.

God Has Acted

This is going to trip us up right away.

The scene is Nazareth, a small town in Galilee, today what would be a 2.5 hour drive north of Jerusalem. The nation of Israel is under Gentile control. The people that God has chosen had changed from being an independent monarchy to a peripheral client state, a small part of the vast Roman Empire. Things had not gone well for God’s people, not just for years but for centuries.

In the middle of this, God shows up in a surprising way.

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” (Luke 1:26-28)

There are two things that are surprising about this.

First, it’s strange. A friend of mine wrote on Facebook about all the things that are hard to believe in the Bible. I get it. If you read the Bible you read about a serpent tempting Adam and Eve, about God speaking from the middle of a burning bush, about city walls falling down after people march around them. You read about people being raised from death to life. We’re faced right away with a conflict between the Bible and a naturalistic worldview that says that there is no supernatural, that angels are just part of our imagination.

Wyatt Graham recently wrote an article called “Christianity Must Be Strange.” He says:

Christianity demands beliefs that seem just as weird as unicorns or forest spirits. We believe that God exists. We believe in seraphim, cherubim, and all sorts of angelic beings who oversee the nations. We worship in a certain manner “because the angels are watching” (1 Corinthians 11:10). We believe in a lamb slain in heaven, a throne room, and martyrs crying out for justice.

Christianity is delightfully weird. And we really cannot make sense of life without this weirdness.

If the Bible is true, then reality is very different from the way we usually think. There is a whole spiritual world that we tend to ignore. And behind that world is a God who cares and acts, sometimes in surprising ways like he does in this passage. Graham continues:

If we do not embrace this strangeness, we will not be able to make sense of life. We will not be able to discern what is really real. We will never expect to encounter an angel during an evening walk. And that is a real tragedy.

Be careful of the danger of the danger of losing the strangeness of Christianity. If we lose it, we lose more than we can afford to lose. We lose the truth that God is real, and that he cares, and that he has acted in history to save us. We’re going to see more of this strangeness in a minute.

But the other surprise is this: that God has acted personally. Look how personally God has acted. The angel Gabriel was sent, by God, to a particular city, to a particular person. Even those of us who view God as active sometimes tend to think of God as a clockmaker God — the one who made all of this, wound it up like a clock, and walked away. But this passage reminds us that God is personally and particularly involved with us, not in the abstract but in the particular — particular people in particular places. God knows your name. God knows your address.

Friends, don’t lose the strangeness of Christianity. Don’t believe the lie that God is absent and that only what you can see is real. If you lose angels and virgin births, you lose the reality of a God who knows you by name and knows everything about your particular situation. God has acted.

But secondly:

Through a Miraculous Birth

If an angel wasn’t strange enough, this is.

And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. 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, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”

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. (Luke 1:31-35)

There are a couple of things we need to know about Jesus.

First, he’s born by a virgin. Remember I said that we need to keep Christianity strange? This is a very good example. It’s very difficult to believe in a virgin birth! But this passage teaches us that Jesus was supernaturally conceived. As hard as this may be for us to accept, it’s essential for us to believe. There are three reasons why it’s essential that Jesus was born to a virgin:

• It shows that God has acted supernaturally to save us. Jesus was not born like the rest of us. God took deliberate action to save us.
• It makes it possible for Jesus to be who he is: fully God and fully human. We need a Savior who is both God and man. If he wasn’t human, then he couldn’t pay the debt that humanity owed. He couldn’t save us. If he wasn’t God, then we’d be in trouble, because only an infinite God could bear the penalty for our sins. Only God can save us.
• It makes it possible for Jesus to be sinless. All of us were born with a sinful nature. We naturally desire what’s wrong. This is part of our nature from birth Only one person since Adam was born without a sin nature, because he was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and his name is Jesus.

This is a miraculous birth, and it has to be! The God who created human life from nothing is also able to create human life, supernaturally, in the womb.

Second, this is also not any ordinary person. He’s called the Son of the Most High. The angel says he will reign on David’s throne in an eternal kingdom. He is here called God’s own Son. This is one of the most important verses in all of Luke about the identity of Jesus. Who is Jesus? He is holy. He is God’s Son. He is the King who will reign forever.

We haven’t done this in a while, but we used to regularly recite the Apostle’s Creed:

I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.

Jesus is no ordinary person. There is no one like him. He stands unique over all of history. There is no one like Jesus.

What is the solution to this world’s problems? Luke tells us: God has acted through a miraculous birth. It’s all God’s initiative, and Jesus is completely unique. There is nobody like him.

But this is all very heady. It’s amazing news, but we need to bring it home to us. God has acted through a miraculous birth…

To Save Humble People

We learn a lot about the way that God works through Mary.

First, she’s nobody. We know almost nothing about her, except that she’s from an out of the way place, a place with no notice in Scripture before now. She’s from nowheresville. She’s most likely a teenager. We read about Mary’s own attitude toward herself later in the chapter: “for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant” (Luke 1:48).

This year I visited a church with a giant statue of Mary in Beirut, 15 tons and 8.5 meters high. It makes Mary seem literally bigger than life. That’s not the picture we see in the Bible of Mary. God doesn’t come to the powerful. God comes to the humble. God comes to nobodies in the middle of nowhere. God comes to humble people like us.

But we also learn a lot from Mary’s response:

And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38)

Friends, how should we respond to Jesus? There is only one way to respond to the God who has acted through a miraculous birth to save humble people. It’s by humbly submitting to his divine will. Mary is an example to us not in terms of her greatness, but in terms of her submission. We’re meant to respond to God’s saving actions in the same way.

God has acted through a miraculous birth to save humble people.

Friends, do you see how strange the story is? Are you prepared to embrace its strangeness? Are you aware that there’s a whole world out there that involves God and angels? Are you prepared to accept that God is intimately involved with this world, that he knows your name and your location?

Are you ready to see Jesus for who he really is? Are you prepared to see that there’s no-one else in history like him? He’s the only person who is both God and human. He’s the only one who is God’s very Son who will reign over an eternal kingdom. Are you prepared to see who Jesus really is?

And I have to ask you: how will you respond to this? Are you humble enough to respond? And will you like Mary submit to God? Will you today accept God’s answer to our greatest problem and put your trust in Jesus who came to save us?

Father, thank you for Jesus. Thank you that you have acted thorough a miraculous birth to save humble people. Like Mary, may we respond by submitting and trusting. I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.