‘God spoke the Incarnation and then so was born the Son. His final Word was Jesus, He needed no other one. Spoke flesh and blood so He could bleed and make a way divine. And so was born the baby, who would die to make it mine.’ (Michael Card, The Final Word )
The Incarnation is both a glorious mystery that leaves the greatest scholar scratching her head, and the most practical, earthy motivation for all our local church ministry. Scripture teaches that Mary was the ‘envelope’ in which the Holy Spirit placed the foetus of Jesus of Nazareth, the ‘Word made flesh’.
The early church was keen to defend the ‘hard-to-believe-and-impossible-to-prove’ claim that Christ was born of a virgin, to fulfil Isaiah’s disputed prophecy. Immanuel was not tainted by the sin of Adam in any way, and Matthew’s Gospel emphasises that there were no sexual relations between Mary and Joseph before Jesus was born.
How to get to the heart of Christmas in conversation
Here’s some good news: this month, for one month only, conversation about the incarnation of Jesus is socially acceptable with …