Rejoice! Rejoice!

GCT:  Rejoice – Rejoice, Emanuel shall come to thee!  I hope that you have been enjoying Luke’s first chapter as much as I have.  The story of Mary and Gabriel is epic!  This story is one of profound mystery and amazing love.  Gabriel declares to a thirteen year old little girl, who has not even made it through puberty, that she has found favor and will bear a child, the Son of God!  This is the gateway to the path of humiliation of the Son of God which ends at the Cross.  Church, it is so very important for us to understand that the Gospel stands or falls upon the incarnation of the Son of God as Jesus Christ.  Our salvation is dependent upon Jesus being fully God and fully Man.

This story declares that God has come! He is with us!  He has become flesh and yet is still God so that we may be saved from our sins and enjoy Him forever.  Rejoice!  God has come to fulfill His requirement of a perfect sacrifice that could bear the weight of the sins of the world and take the full blow of His wrath.  Rejoice!  Man could not stand up to that requirement.  Christmas is about God in his loving kindness coming down Himself to appease and satisfy His righteous demands that are upon us.  He took care of His requirements that are upon us to be perfectly holy and righteous.  In perfect love, God sent his Son in the flesh, Jesus Christ, to be the perfect sacrifice for our sin.  God became flesh to save us.  Rejoice!  Rejoice!  This Christmas let us faithfully and delightfully embrace the truth that Jesus existed before He became man, from all eternity as infinite and unchangeable God, the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God.

As you ponder these truths you most likely will arrive at this vista of perpetual thought where all you can say is that this incarnation is absolutely mysterious!  Yes, absolutely, it is definitely a deep thing of God.  Spurgeon said, the Incarnation is “a mystery which we must not attempt to fathom, for it is utterly beyond the grasp of any finite being.  As well might a gnat seek to drink in the ocean, as a finite creature to comprehend the Eternal God.  A God whom we could understand would be no God.  If we could grasp him he could not be infinite: if we could understand him, then were he not divine."

Let the mystery and love of the Incarnation drive you to have a worship-filled Christmas!
 
Luke 1:35 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.

We will be enjoying this story of Incarnation this Sunday.  I will see you at Worship!  Rejoice! Rejoice! - Steve