Mark Clark [00:00:00]:
Hey, everyone. Mark here. Welcome to the Mark Clark Podcast. Hopefully you are doing well. Today we kick off our Magic of Christmas series by diving into the Gospel of Luke and exploring the amazing story of Christmas. And just a reminder, for those of you who subscribe to the newsletter that I send out every week, make sure you sign up to subscribe to that@pastormarkclark.com you can go there and I send out information every week. But those of you who already subscribe, I sent you a free preview of my book that's coming out in February. So make sure you check your email and download that.
Mark Clark [00:00:32]:
It's the introduction to the problem of life, which comes out in February, so make sure you look at that. And for those of you who don't subscribe yet, make sure you shoot over there because I give a whole bunch of content every single week and free stuff as well, because it's Christmas. So we decided to do something for y'all. We are exploring in this series the incredible story of Mary, her encounter with the angel Gabriel and the virgin birth. So this isn't just a story about a far off event. It's a message of hope, grace, and the reminder that God uses imperfect people like you and me and places to do his most perfect work. So stick around. This is a message that could change your life.
Mark Clark [00:01:13]:
Let's get into it. We're calling this the Magic of Christmas. Why that word? Well, it doesn't mean it in, like, the real world, like, dark arts kind of way that we use that word. God is against that. And that's actually part of our journey to find, though, the real magic. That's what we're talking about, the good side that fills the world. That magic, like the one who fills the world with his presence, his love, his grace, who is in all and through all, and all things were made through him. Kind of supernatural thing.
Mark Clark [00:01:44]:
The peace of us, we gotta recognize, is always pining to reach into that world and grab ahold of it. That's why we sit down and we watch Hallmark movies this time of year. Or Romeo and Juliet, Beauty and the Beast. We watch these romance stories and they capture our heart. There's magic in those stories because there's magic at the center of our existence. Even Jesus in the church. Ultimately, it's a romance story. It's a prince coming for his bride, leaving his palace.
Mark Clark [00:02:17]:
And he has to do what? Defeat a dark enemy, Satan, sin and death, in order to win her back. It's like all those stories with their magic, and yet they're somehow real. It's like a memory that we have of a time when, like Peter Pan, we could really fly or something. And the gospel is that we kind of came from a world like that. It was perfect and it was filled with the supernatural. We had this relationship with God and we're going back to that world somehow. But how do we get back to it? That's where things are really enchanted, in a sense. The Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she once said this.
Mark Clark [00:02:53]:
She said, earth's crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God. But only he who sees takes off his shoes. The rest sit round and pluck blackberries. See, what if we could from this day forward, be the kinds of people who actually see every bush of fire with God rather than just going through life. Admittedly, we are surrounded by the second kind almost at every moment kind of person. And sometimes we are that person. Like in every sphere of our lives, there are people and places and things fighting for us to do just that, to sit around and pluck blackberries, to see the physical, temporal world around us with all of its decadence and flavor and sparkle and ease and quick hits of pleasure and those pressures around us want us to settle. But this whole season, where it came from, is magical in that sense.
Mark Clark [00:03:49]:
It's weird, it's supernatural at its very core. Those virgin births and angels and visitors confused teenagers. The whole thing is bizarre. And the awesome thing about it is that it's shot through with that kind of magic. It's hopeful for all of us that God would then use as we're going to talk about today and throughout the whole series, imperfect people like us, imperfect circumstances, imperfect situations that feel. That's the moment we're in this season, that God, this imperfect time on planet Earth. And of course, it's an imperfect time right now. And yet if we maybe if we look for it, if we're open to it, God could do something magical in our moment, just like that moment, the imperfect moment.
Mark Clark [00:04:39]:
And it could be life changing for all of us. So this. How does this whole Christmas story actually start? Well, it's in Luke chapter one. And so for the next four messages, three Sundays and Christmas Eve, we're going to look at the stories that come out of Luke Chapter one and Luke Chapter two. And here's the first thing that happens in Luke one, how it all begins, this magical, weird moment. An angel shows up. And so you can see it in verse 26 is where the story actually picks up in the sixth month. That's the six months since Elizabeth has Been pregnant.
Mark Clark [00:05:10]:
Elizabeth is Mary's cousin. So Mary is Jesus mother. And it starts with her and an angel. Literally a messenger is the word. Gabriel shows up and of course the text calls him Gabriel the angel. And there's only two angels that are actually named in the entire Bible, Gabriel and Michael. And so this is the high end angel, kind of leader angel. And the text says that he was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth.
Mark Clark [00:05:40]:
So here's what we got to understand. This is a really upside down, almost oxymoronic idea that an angel of this caliber would be sent to a city like Nazareth. Because Nazareth was a hole in the ground. It's just a dump. Nazareth was the kind of that dead end town with graffiti all over the place, run by the mob. You don't want to go there. It was only 50 to 100 people tops of the time. It was the place you stop when you're going somewhere.
Mark Clark [00:06:09]:
It's the place you go and get gas and you go to the 711 and get a corndog or something. That's the place. But you forget it quick. It's the place on the way to the actual place. It really. And you gotta hear this with your own life, is a place that God should not visit. He should not actually use it. It's a disaster.
Mark Clark [00:06:29]:
It's messed up. Like those of us who come in here with our sin, with our secrets, with the sexual stuff that we've done, the stuff we've done with money, the stuff we've done with people, the things we've done to our family, the things that we've done to our friends behind their backs. God should not use us, y'all. We're broken people. We're holes in the ground, in the wall. And yet an angel is sent here and does this amazing thing. It's very similar to Bethlehem. Bethlehem is the kind of place too, where Jesus, of course, is gonna be born.
Mark Clark [00:07:02]:
It's the kind of place God doesn't get born in. I mean, it's God. If you want to influence God should have come to the, to Jerusalem, to Rome, to Athens, some cultural hub today. He should have come to LA or Paris or London or New York and gone. Here I am. I'm going to do an influential thing. I'm going to do a magical thing. I'm going to do a supernatural thing.
Mark Clark [00:07:22]:
But he comes to the people of where, this hole in the wall. He comes to this place with no power, no influence. And yet God does this amazing thing. And some of you are like, yeah, but you don't know me. You don't know what I've done with my family and my finances and my job. You have no idea what kind of stuff I walk in here with and sit here and watch this. Or maybe you're watching online. You have no idea.
Mark Clark [00:07:45]:
You have no idea. That's true. But as I've shared from my own story, I'm the poster boy for God should never have used me in any significant way at all in my life. But it's because of him. It's because of him, not because of me. That's the hope. It's in spite of myself. I come from a very broken home.
Mark Clark [00:08:02]:
My father was a deadbeat dad. He divorced My mom, couldn't keep a job. His sister was a schizophrenic. My aunt, she actually ended her own life. But here I am. And you're watching me right now on a screen. Why? Because God takes the broken, ridiculous things of the world and he does something with them that can restore and help people. That's what Christmas is about.
Mark Clark [00:08:26]:
We can connect back to him in spite of ourselves and gain eternal life. He enters into your brokenness and your hurt and your pain, and he uses you. Not because of you, but in spite of you. This is what Christmas is. This is the beauty and the magic of the Christmas story. So if you come in here thinking, well, but I gotta earn this and I'm not good enough, Christmas is preaching at you, proclaiming to you. You're not your brokenness. God comes to you in spite of how small and insignificant the mistakes you've made.
Mark Clark [00:08:59]:
It's a beautiful thing. And then it says the text back to Luke 1. The angel came to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph. So we. So we gotta hone in on what he means by this word virgin. Okay? There are many scholars today, skeptics today, people who don't believe in Christianity. And this is one of the reasons they say. Don't you know that the word virgin here, the Greek word virgin here does not actually mean a literal virgin.
Mark Clark [00:09:25]:
It doesn't mean a woman who's not slept with a man. It simply means young maiden or a young woman. And so both in this text, they say, and in Isaiah, chapter 7, verse 14, where Isaiah says, a virgin will be conceived and have a son and call his name Emmanuel. Right? Both of those texts in the Hebrew and the Greek say young maiden and not virgin. And so they say. I mean, I remember a guy called one day a few years ago, he called the church And I picked up the phone when I was kind of the only one working at the church. And he was like, hey. And he was from a cult, right? And he's literally.
Mark Clark [00:10:00]:
He said, he didn't tell me. He didn't, you know, he came from a cult. That wasn't his opening line, like, hey, I'm from a cult. Just wondering, you know. But he said, I come from this religious background. I'm wondering if you'd like to chat. But he called and he said, you're a pastor, you teach at the church, you teach the Bible and you teach that Jesus was born of a virgin. I said, yeah.
Mark Clark [00:10:16]:
And it was around Christmas time. So he said, well, don't you know that that's wrong? Don't you know that you're teaching wrong? And I said, well, what do you mean? He said, because those words don't actually mean virgin. So I said, why don't you open up Luke 1 with me and we'll work through it. So I did. And he pointed out that the word virgin, like I said, it doesn't mean virgin, means young maiden. So I said, I don't believe it necessarily because of Luke chapter one or Isaiah chapter seven. I believe it because Matthew chapter one said. He's like, what do you mean? I said, well, if you would like to open that up, let's look at it.
Mark Clark [00:10:46]:
So he opened that up and we started reading Matthew chapter one twice. Matthew tells us they hadn't slept together before they had this baby and could see which was clearly conceived of the Holy Spirit. And then he hung up on me. Because the point is like, here's the reality. We begin to understand this text. Yes, might mean young maiden technically, but there's a couple levels to this. The first level is we believe she was a virgin because Matthew tells us that. Not because the etymology of these words, but we believe it because of what Matthew tells us secondarily, that she didn't sleep with Joseph and she was conceived of the Holy Spirit.
Mark Clark [00:11:22]:
Like that's what Matthew tells us. So in our culture it's a little bit different because she was probably 14, 15 years old. So a 15 year old girl in our culture, because the culture we live in, where they have phones and Snapchat, and so it's not weird to think that an unmarried pregnant girl would actually get pregnant, all right, that they'd be sexually active. What we have to understand is even saying the word young maiden or young woman having her birth be 13, 14, 15 years old, which Mary was that by definition in that culture was Synonymous with being a virgin. Because in that culture, it's a conservative Jewish culture, right? So conservative Jewish girls, they didn't just do whatever they wanted. They didn't have this modern expression of dating that we have. She was the text as betrothed. So they would have had a caravan of chaperones around them at all times.
Mark Clark [00:12:11]:
Joseph wouldn't just show up on his donkey at like 8 and be like, hey, picking you up, Mary, let's go. And they'd go off in some dark spot till 11. All right? That's our culture, that's what we do. And that's why we can't stay pure. You're never gonna win that fight if that's how you live. I sit with young couples who are like, man, I can't figure this out. I want to stay pure. But it's like, okay, well tell me what you're doing.
Mark Clark [00:12:33]:
Well, I don't know. We snuggle up on the couch, it's 11 o'clock, we put on a Jennifer Aniston movie and it's like. And he gets hot and handsy. Of course he's getting handsy, right? That's what happens when you snuggle up and watch Jennifer Aniston movies and it's pitch black. You're not going to ever win that fight. So you're not supposed to win that fight in a sense. So the problem is you're supposed to put on the movie at 6 and make it the Grinch and have your family around. That's the scenario Mary's in.
Mark Clark [00:12:59]:
She's in a scenario where this meant being a 14 year old girl, a young maiden, was synonymous with being a virgin. Not like us. And so we have to begin to understand that culturally speaking, when this angel says, this young woman is going to conceive of the Holy Spirit, this is the reason we go, man, this is something big. It's a virgin. It's a conservative Jewish girl. Now here's when things get crazy. If you're a teenage girl in the audience, remember what that is. Like imagine that you get a visitation by an angel and they say, now you're going to be pregnant and you're going to raise God.
Mark Clark [00:13:30]:
Like, let's let the Christmas magic of Christmas wash over us a little bit how crazy that is, right? Like, I don't even know. How do you do discipline on a kid when you're raising God? Like, you gotta go, you gotta time out Jesus. And he's like, I'll give you a timeout, all right? Like, how do you do that to God. It's like, don't talk back to me. And don't talk back to me when you stand before me in judgment, Mom. All right, like, that's just gonna be weird. There's a weird dynamic. Anyway, so you're 14, and you're trying to raise God.
Mark Clark [00:14:04]:
Crazy. Here's the beauty of it. The text says, he. She's betrothed to a man named Joseph of the house of David, and the virgin's name was Mary. Women like, let me hone in on you for a sec, ladies. We love you. Here's what we see. We see that when God decides to do the most important thing that history has ever seen done, he chooses to do it through a woman.
Mark Clark [00:14:28]:
Come on, give it up. Praise God. Amen, wherever you are. But it's just the importance of. It's massive in the plan of God. And now that's not weird for us because we tend to have strong women around us. I had a strong mom who raised me as a single mom, Basically sold everything she had just to raise me and my brother. I have a strong wife who many people look at and say, the best part about you is your wife to me.
Mark Clark [00:14:54]:
All right, Like, I was literally. That's a quote from my church planting assessment when I was getting assessed. They're like, we're, you know, we don't think you could plant a church, but she could. It's like, okay, great. So at the end, I got it. They gave me the green light. Why do we do that? I literally got up at the assessment, and you can't plan for what they're going to ask you in these church planning assessments. So I kind of, you know, answered, like, studied all these questions.
Mark Clark [00:15:18]:
And then I got up, and they said, do you like doing evangelism? I'm like, yeah. He's like, do you like reaching your neighbors? Right, of course. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I love reaching my neighbors. And they're like, okay, so what's your neighbor's name? And I was like, in front of this tribunal of people, like, dear neighbor that lives beside you, what's their name? And I didn't even have a clue. I was like, oh, sorry, I don't actually know their name. And then I made this mistake.
Mark Clark [00:15:45]:
I said, but that's because we just moved. And they're like, oh, okay. So I'm like, yeah, So I don't know their name. We moved about four months ago. And they're like, oh, okay. So tell us who your neighbors were before you moved. Like, the house next to You. And I was like, what? And then she pipes up and she's like, wow.
Mark Clark [00:16:02]:
There's Sarah across the road. She's really struggling with cancer right now. And then her husband Tom, he's kind of working through something. And we brought them cookies the other day. And then there's Janice over here. She's going to go into tutoring, and her daughter, and she was wondering about this dog. And Aaron just starts to go off. And so Aaron's like, I brought them stuff.
Mark Clark [00:16:19]:
And they're like, all right, so this is a woman. All right, this is. They're strong. They're beautifully strong. And this is why God uses women to do so many things through history. It's a beautiful thing. They're just, in so many ways, stronger than men. So if there's a reason that God.
Mark Clark [00:16:35]:
Like, I can't picture God giving me the responsibility to birth children, to go through the pain of childbirth. I stubbed my toe. I'm out for. For a couple weeks. All right, that's just like, women get sick, they're like, let's just keep going. Things gotta get done. Let's go. They just.
Mark Clark [00:16:50]:
They have it the. Go, go, go. So God comes to Mary, an amazing young woman who's a virgin. And she's young, but he comes to her. So, ladies, listen, stop looking at Rihanna or the Kardashians to be role models for you. Look to women like Mary. Don't look to the culture that's going to tell you. You got to do this.
Mark Clark [00:17:13]:
You got to do. Post these pictures. You got to have this many likes. It's garbage. They're lies. Like Mary, here's the woman you're supposed to do. You're supposed to believe what God says about you. That he loves you, that you're beautiful, that you need to love and serve him and others and be pure, rather than selling out to the cultural idea of being liked because of what you do with your body.
Mark Clark [00:17:37]:
And this is what power is, and this is what woman it is. This is what sexuality. That's what's going on. And then you have Mary, and she's just this example that you gotta hold onto. Now, here's the danger in saying that I don't wanna go off too far off the rails, because some Christians have gone off the rails and said, look at Mary, she's so great. And there's certain denominations within Christianity go, she's so great. She's in fact perfect, right? She has no sin in her. So.
Mark Clark [00:18:03]:
So she's just. And they pray to her, Hail Mary. Full of grace. But here's what the text actually says. He came to her and said, greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you. And then down at verse 30, he says, do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Literally what he says is grace. You have found grace with God.
Mark Clark [00:18:23]:
Right? This is very important. Mary is not the source of grace for other people. She's the recipient of grace from God. She gets God to move, move first and say, you have found favor with me. It's not that you're perfect. It's not that you're sinless. It's that I'm perfect. I'm sinless.
Mark Clark [00:18:38]:
I'm giving you the grace. And so I'm going to work with you. And here's, here's the big principle out of this, that sometimes that we do is there's two ways to read the Bible. Some of us, if we were raised in church, sometimes we read the Bible the first way and it's the wrong way. It's that we read the Bible looking for heroes. And then over time, it just crushes us. So we read the Old Testament. I want to be like Abraham, I read David, I read Samson.
Mark Clark [00:19:04]:
And we begin to say to ourselves, I want to be David, I want to be Samson. I want to go slay the giants of my life. The financial problems in my life. If I had enough courage, I could be like David. I could fight the battles. If I could be like Samson, if I could have faith like Noah, all of those things. And where the mistake is, is over time, what begins to happen is you begin to read the Bible is if you're trying to find yourself in it and all these principles from all these characters. But the problem is the Bible isn't about a whole book of characters and a whole book of heroes.
Mark Clark [00:19:34]:
There's only one hero in the Bible and his name is Jesus. And all of these people function as broken, messed up people who are looking for somebody else to be their hero, because they're not. So if you go and you look at the Abraham story, he slept around. David was a murderer and an adulterer. Noah was a drunk. So we look at these two and we say, I want to be like these people. The problem is these people are like, they're a mess. So what's the other possibility? Well, we gotta take great hope from that, that you read the story as if every single story is about God.
Mark Clark [00:20:06]:
The victory of God over the world of Jesus. If you're anything like me, we're always kind of playing the Role of the good guy. When we read the Gospels, it's like, there's Pharisees around and they're like, hey, Jesus, we want to stone you and hurt you and you're doing a bad job. Now when you're reading it, you tend to be Jesus in the right. You're like, you're the guy walking around just telling all your friends how to be godly, and hey, this is the way to be holy. And you guys are wrong. And I'm Jesus, and I'm just walking on water trying to help all you guys out and getting crucified by my friend. That means my friends don't like me and people in my community group are being jerks.
Mark Clark [00:20:42]:
And you're not supposed to read the story like that, though. You're actually the Pharisee who is stoning Jesus because he dies for your sin, because of you, for you, because of you. And instead of you. And so you have to understand that you're the bad guys in the story. You're the guys at the foot of the cross yelling because it's your sin that put them there. So I don't know if you stopped long enough this season to ask yourself this very important question, but it's an important one nonetheless. Why is it necessary? Why did God do it this way? Where he gave, he comes and he interacts with the virgin and made it so that when Jesus lives his life and is conceived that it be done in this style with a virgin? Like, there's a lot of answers that have been given throughout history. I disagree with most of them.
Mark Clark [00:21:27]:
So let me tell you the couple answers that I actually disagree with, and I'll tell you what I think is going on here. One of the answers that's given is the reason God does it this way is because God is anti sex, right? He doesn't like sex. He only believes in sex for procreation, and that's why he does it this way. And so there's denominations that say Mary was a virgin her whole life, right? She never did that dirty act, because that's dirty and that's wrong and that's not what God wants. But that's false. We know that. And some of you grew up in churches like that, and you've lived with a psychology of sexuality that's so negative that it's affected the way you function in the world. But when you read the Bible, we know that God is very pro sex in the context of marriage.
Mark Clark [00:22:08]:
He's constantly encouraging people. Those whole books of the Bible, Song of Solomon, There's a whole book about the importance of the sexuality in the context of a marriage. First Corinthians, chapter 7, encourage over and over. God wants pleasure, procreation, protection in the context of sexuality. And we know that. And some of you have stayed away from Christianity because you thought that be liberated from that. God wants this, actually wants to use sexuality to draw you to himself and joy and love and flourish in the context of your marriage. Now, here's the second bad idea, I think, is that some people say God does it this way because Jesus had to be sinless.
Mark Clark [00:22:44]:
And if he had two parents, if he has a father, then he's going to get the sinful nature transferred over to him. Now, I'm not saying I totally disagree with that, but I don't see the necessity of it because it assumes that the father is the one who translates the sinful nature over to the child. Now, I don't know, you know, if the lady's just kind of smuggled this in somewhere in history and I. But, but while we love the ladies, we don't love you that much that we think that you're sinless. And somehow all the sinful nature that comes into your child comes from the dad. It would also put the woman in a spot where they, you know, start to resent us a little bit. Like every time the kid bites someone, you're think of your kids. Every time they bite someone, every time they lie, it's like, nah, that stupid husband of mine gave this kid the sinful nature and now what are we going to do? The Bible doesn't say that.
Mark Clark [00:23:32]:
It says the sinful nature comes, doesn't say it comes through the Father at all. It doesn't give any indication that it comes from either one. And secondly, if the Holy Spirit can overshadow and block her sinful nature, which we do believe she had, and she doesn't pass it on to Jesus, then the Holy Spirit could do the same thing in regard to Joseph. If Jesus had two parents, he could also block Joseph's sinful nature and it doesn't get passed on to Jesus. He could block it all. So I don't think it's necessary. So what's the meaning of the virgin birth? Dead? What's the point? So there's people who come in and they argue, okay, Mary's just like an incubator for Jesus. So Jesus maybe wouldn't people sit around and they debate this stuff? Like, would Jesus have looked like Mary? Does she pass her genes on to.
Mark Clark [00:24:11]:
Would people are walking around like oh, you have Mary's nose and you have Mary's eyes. Is that what's going on? This is the stuff that keeps Bible college kids awake at night. So I don't think that's what's going on in this text. The text doesn't care about all this stuff. So what's the meaning? What's the point? I think there's a uniqueness of Jesus Christ that's being shown. He doesn't have a human father. He comes from the heavens. So that when people are talking about his uniqueness and saying, who is this? Why is he here? I don't understand how he's got these powers.
Mark Clark [00:24:40]:
It's because he's not natural. He's magic in a sense. He's something else. Right? 32 times in the Gospel of John, he says, I came from heaven. That's really strange language if you think about it. No founder of any religion claims that about themselves. Muhammad did not claim that. Joseph Smith did not claim that.
Mark Clark [00:25:04]:
But Jesus comes and he claims I'm actually from the heavens. 32 times in the Gospel of John alone, he says, I already existed, but then I came into the world. And then there's, of course. So there's the uniqueness, but then there's, of course, this beautiful point of God is saying to us something about salvation in coming in the context of virgin. He's saying, I'm the one who had to bring salvation about because you couldn't. That's the point of the virgin birth. You tried so hard, you need a savior so bad, but you couldn't. You couldn't do it.
Mark Clark [00:25:45]:
So I had to do it for you. I had to save you from yourself. Humankind could not get a savior enough into human society, so I had to come and do it by the Holy Spirit. I made it happen. I took the initiative. I moved first because you can't save yourself. That's what Christmas is preaching on. And some of you sitting here right now, you're exploring or you have doubts and you wonder.
Mark Clark [00:26:08]:
And here's the thing. This is God saying this, what we're talking about, this massive, so mysterious, so powerful, so magical. He uses situations that seem unlikely to bring about what, the transformation of the world, of you, of your families, of your finances. He cares about all that, your addictions, the stuff that's derailing your life. And he comes down into the nitty gritty, and some of you are like, yeah, I don't know. I don't know about this. I don't know. Listen, I'll give you A story to close about how we experienced and how we've experienced the bigness of this God.
Mark Clark [00:26:43]:
Okay. Years ago, I was sitting at my desk at work, and this overwhelming thought came over me in, like, a spiritual sense in an instant that I was supposed to go and visit this particular house of a woman in our church. So I went to the secretary and I said, hey, do you know her address? Do you know, can I get her name? You know, whatever. And I'm just like, I don't know what to do with this, but I really felt this overwhelming sense that it was supposed to be now. And she said, sure. And so I drove up to her house and I knocked on the door, and, like, for 10 minutes, she didn't answer the door. And so I just stood there. I just knew I was supposed to be there.
Mark Clark [00:27:19]:
And finally she opened the door and she said, hi. What do you. What do you want? She's, like, in her, like, pajamas, and she's like, what do you want? And I'm like, I don't know. I just feel like I was supposed to come here and chat with you. And so I went in, she goes, you want some tea? And we sat and had tea. We're sitting there for three hours in her living room chatting about life and theology and God and all this stuff. And we're drinking our tea, and I left and I hugged her and I prayed for her. And she said, just before you leave, do you know why I was in my pajamas at one or two in the afternoon when you came to the door? And it took me 10 minutes to come to the door? I said, well, no.
Mark Clark [00:27:52]:
She's like, because I'm going through something so tragic in my life right now that I woke up this morning and I walked down the stairs and I said to myself, God, I'm going to take my own life today unless you send someone to my house to encourage me. And I fell asleep in my living room in my PJs, on the chair and woke up to the sound of you knocking a my door. Guys, this is what we're talking about. We look at the Christmas story and it becomes like a. Like a little kids thing, right? We look at the. Oh, little pictures, you know, oh, there's Mary and there's Jesus. So cute. And there's little deers around and little squirrels, and it's.
Mark Clark [00:28:38]:
But the Christmas story is like this serious, weighty, joyous thing, too. That's this massive, mysterious God who's way ahead of us and moves first to save people, because if he waited for us it would never happen. We'd have destruction in our life, we'd have death. So he shows up, he takes a move in Jesus toward us. And now it becomes this. He knocks on the door and it becomes now about the question of what about you, do you listen? Do you trust? Do you follow? Do you repent? Do you become humble? Do you respond? This is what the story becomes about. Do you keep strong and hard to yourself? Or do you go, gosh, this God came for me, I gotta humble myself? It's. Do you break yourself open? Even if, even if you're the skeptic here he is so powerful and so big and he moved for you.
Mark Clark [00:29:41]:
He came for you, he died for you, he rose again for you. And now it's our job, like Mary, to respond by saying, okay, I'll do it, I'm yours, whatever, I'll be obedient. I don't even understand all of it, but I'm gonna put my faith in you. And there are people who just need, in this moment, as we worship, as we respond in this moment, there are people who just need to enter into worship and be changed on the spot by the God of the universe. There are people who, in this moment, whether you're watching online or watching in one of our sites, you actually need to come to know Christ as we reflect and as we sing. That you would receive Jesus as your Lord, your Savior, your treasure. That you would realize that this Christmas magic in a sense is the supernatural move of God to save you. That's why we reflected so deeply on all of this that some of you might all.
Mark Clark [00:30:37]:
There's pagan stories and what's this virgin thing? It's the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and the fact that we couldn't save ourself. And so Mary's this 15 year old virgin, like nothing about it makes any sense. And that's the point. This is the gospel we're talking about. Who hunts down people like you and me, who shows up to the Nazareths and the Bethlehems of the world who don't deserve the grace. And he saves us and uses us beyond ourselves. So Father, we pray in this moment that our hearts and minds would be zoned in, we would not be distracted as you speak in the very symbol of everything this story just told us, that you would speak and save and comfort and give encouragement to every person watching this, listening to this, souls would be stirred to be obedient like Mary was obedient when you showed up, when you knocked, that we would rise to the occasion and follow you for your glory and the good of people, that that's what this season would be about. And as we journey over the next few weeks through this God, that you would speak in a powerful way in the practical realities of our life, and it would change us, it would transform us in the way that this whole story magically changed the world.
Mark Clark [00:31:58]:
In Jesus great name we pray. Amen.