How God used faith, His convenant, and prophecy in the Christmas story

Welcome to episode 337. We're continuing to talk about faith, and we're going to look at how God used faith to bring Jesus into the world. But before we get started, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, if you remember, we were talking about Abraham in the previous episode, and we talked about Genesis 12. Now I'm going to read that real quick. And I will bless them that bless you and curse him that curses you, and in you shall all families of the earth be blessed. And I'm gonna stop there. God gave Abraham a covenant. God's gonna bless them that blesses Abraham, and he's gonna curse anyone that curses Abraham. If you are a Christian, one of the reasons that we continually need to pray for Israel is because we need to bless those if we want to walk in the abundant life. It's all about God, it's all about God's people, and you and I are God's people, but so are the Jews. And so we have got to get a handle on that, but I'm not here to talk about that. I'm not going to chase that rabbit, but I want to show you with the Christmas story how God used faith, and he did it by the words of the prophet's mouth. He used men of faith to speak forth the word of God. First, I want to show you the initial seed that God planted way back at the fall that was going to grow into God's salvation message. And that original scripture is Genesis 3:15: And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; and it shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. And that was the prophetic message that God had to Satan after he had Adam and Eve eat of the tree of good and evil. God said, there's going to come a day when I'm gonna have a child and he is gonna crush your head. You're a punk. That's my words. I don't want to add to the Bible, but Satan is a punk. And God just calls him out right here and says, look, there's going to come a day when the seed of this woman all the way through time is going to crush your head. Now you're going to make it uncomfortable to him, you're going to bruise his heel, he's going to give a death blow to you. And Satan, had he known how this thing was going to end, he never would have crucified Jesus. But he did. And all of this came to pass. Satan is very smart compared to you and I, but compared to God, he's a fool. He's an idiot. He has no business fighting against God, but that's the battle that he chose, and that's the battle that he's going to die on. I want to go to another prophecy where it talks about the virgin birth. That is in Isaiah 7:14. Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel. And Emmanuel, if you didn't know, is God with us. And that is such a wonderful verse, and that is such a wonderful promise. Modern science and everybody that says we need to follow the science, we need to, oh, follow the science. Well, modern science says that the blood of the male is what determines the blood of the child. So the blood of the male is passed on to the child at conception. I don't claim to understand it all. I just believe it. Since we're following the science, we're going to go with it. The virgin birth is such an important truth. Satan always comes against the word of God, and so when he tries to come against this virgin birth He's trying to get you to believe a lie, but God himself said this will be a sign: a virgin shall conceive. That's incredible. But the reason that a virgin had to conceive was because when Adam bit the fruit, his blood became tainted. And again, I don't understand it all, but every person that was ever born comes from the bloodline of Adam. Every person. And you and I were born in sin. And that's not because your mother and father were not married and they were sinning and had you. No, that means it was a sin bloodline. Sin was in the blood, so it was passed on from person to person. We are born in sin. That's what the Bible says. We were conceived in sin. The bloodline was passed on. So God had to get a separate bloodline started, and that was Jesus. God became a man and dwelt among us. And we're going to go to John. It's one of my favorite scriptures. John 1:1 and 1:14. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. I love the Gospel of John, is such a great book. And if you haven't been in the Bible for a long time, I want to encourage you to start reading right there and ask the Holy Spirit Holy Spirit, lead me into all truth. Help me with this, and help me since you were the author of this book. Help me to understand what you want me to understand. It's that simple. God's not a respecter of persons. If he'll help me, he's going to help you. I just want to encourage you. I don't know who needed to hear that, but there you go. So we see God speaking, and if you remember way back in the day in Genesis 1, the whole chapter, it says God said it and then he saw it. God said it and then he saw it. In Genesis, God spoke out words and saw the physical manifestation of his spoken word. That's how faith happens down here on earth. He was showing us a pattern. And so I want to take us to the Christmas story. This is found in Luke. This is when Gabriel came and visited Mary, and it's in Luke 1:35-38. And the angel answered and said to her, the Holy Spirit will come upon you And the power of the Highest will overshadow you. Therefore also that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God. Now indeed, Elizabeth your relative has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is now the sixth month for her who was called barren. For with God nothing will be impossible. Then Mary said, Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word. And the angel departed from her. And I want to stop there. I want you over this Christmas weekend— it's going to be Christmas here Sunday, and that's why I wanted to kind of combine these two things. Abraham was given the covenant. We're going to talk about that in the next episode after Christmas. I want you to concentrate on this covenant. We're going to talk about the blessing of Abraham and the covenant. The Abrahamic covenant is what God spoke over Abraham, and he said, all nations will be blessed through you. And that was talking about Jesus. He was going to be born through the Abraham lineage. Jesus was going to come through Abraham. In fact, if you go back to Genesis 3— and that's kind of why I want to kind of pull all this together— Genesis 3:15 said the seed, Eve's seeds, it's going to start at Eve and it's going to come through this lineage of Eve. And then the whole world went corrupt. Then we had Noah who got on the ark. It came through Noah, his seed, and then it went through Abraham, his seed. Then it went through David, the seed of David. It is incredible. If you pull this string all the way through the Old Testament, you will see that it leads to where Gabriel spoke this word over Mary. And Mary could have said, heck no, I don't want nothing to do with this thing. But But God was preparing Mary. She was the mother of Jesus. And I just listened to Christmas song Mary Did You Know, and if you haven't listened to that in a while, I want to encourage you to go listen to that. It is a great song. It said, did you know when you kissed your little baby that you kissed the face of God? And that is an incredible line. And I don't know if we have owned the fact Mary held God in her hand. She reared God from an infant to a young man who then became the Son of Man, and it started with the Word. Everything starts with the Word of God. That's my soapbox moment. Satan's going to come against the Word of God. That's his job. We destroy Satan by the Word. We submit ourselves to God, then we can resist the devil and he'll flee. But we have to submit. I know I'm probably teaching on 8 different things, but this is so incredible. I want to encourage you, I love Thanksgiving. Christmas, I feel like someone just grabbed me by the nose or by the cheek and just pulling me through all this. I love spending time with my family. I love what the season means, but I'm telling you, it just— all this stress and all this angst and all this anxiety It does not come from God. That comes from the punk. It's because they made this season something that it wasn't intended to be. Satan always does that. He always takes something wonderful and he adds a worldly view to it. He makes it ugly, in my opinion. And if you get into the word of God and you allow the word of God to get into you, you will see Christmas for what it is. It's when God became a man and he came here to die And I'm not going to start teaching on that. I want to pray. God, I thank you so much for your word. I thank you for your salvation message. But God, you had to come here as a baby. You're— by your word, you came as a baby. Mary accepted the word that was spoken over her, and that allowed you to come in. She was impregnated by the word of God. And that is incredible. That's too much for my mind to comprehend, but God, it is such a wonderful truth and is something that we fight to keep. Lord, you— the virgin birth is such a cool deal and it's such an important truth. God, I pray that this listener, this video watcher, will understand the importance of the virgin birth. And during this Christmas period, Lord, I pray that you would just open up their minds to take in more and more of your truths and more and more of your love. God, we thank you, we love you, we ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, thank you for being a part of this, and I look forward to visiting with you in the next episode. Thanks for listening to the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast at www.nodoubtonlybelieve.com.