The angel, Gabriel, in a few short words, broke into the normal, unremarkable life of this girl and dropped some unbelievable news on her. And Mary, to her credit, doesn’t disbelieve or mock the impossible, she humbly asks, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” She was not married and had never been with a man so that’s a good question. She was apparently open to the idea that she would be the Mother of the Messiah, but a virgin birth was beyond comprehension. Nobody had ever heard of such a thing. Gabriel answered her as best he could or perhaps as far as he was permitted to by God, but his response is kind of vague and poetic rather than a precise description of how God came to be conceived in Mary’s womb. He says “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.” He does not inform Mary, or us, about exactly how Mary conceived. He simply adds in verse 37, “Nothing will be impossible for God.”
Ponder with me the mystery of that moment though.
God is so big, so deep, so high, and so wide that He is completely without borders. There is no limit or end to Him. There’s nothing He can’t do. Nothing he doesn’t know. No place where He is not. At the moment when the Holy Spirit came upon Mary and the power of the Most High overshadowed her, she would conceive in her womb, the omnipresent, A God who was everywhere- all at once- all of Him, from the bottom of the ocean to the tops of the Himalayas all the way out into the far reaches of the galaxy and beyond willingly limited Himself to the small confines of Mary’s womb- oceans upon oceans contained in a thimble.
God is all-knowing. But in this mysterious moment the All-Knowing laid that aside and took on the simple, limited intellect of a developing fetus.
The all-powerful God, so powerful that he spoke this world into being out of nothing chose to be born as a feeble baby lacking the power even to say “Mama.”
The God who is rich beyond measure, willed Himself to be born into the care of two poor, frightened teenagers– so poor that they would place the baby Jesus in a feeding trough for a crib.
Somehow, I never get tired of thinking about that. Even though the Christmas story is one of the most familiar portion of scriptures to us it still has the ability to surprise us. I was studying and thinking about the Christmas passages recently when it occurred to me that the Christmas story contains some great parenting tips.
Whether your kids are little or all grown up, listen in as we look at this old, familiar story with new eyes to see what helpful advice it might contain for Christian parents.