"Conceived by God the Spirit, Born of a Virgin." (Luke 1: 30-38; Hebrews 2:14-18, 4:15-16.)

The Apostles’ Creed is the oldest, and most widely accepted statement of faith in Christianity. It wasn’t written by the Apostles (Jesus’s companions) but it became accepted in the early centuries as a faithful summary of what the Apostles taught. In this week's sermon, we are continuing to learn about the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, and the way that his incarnation (taking on flesh and blood) enabled himself to fulfill his mission of restoring and rescuing the world. The scripture teaches us that the unique humanity of Jesus enables us to bring every part of our human experience to him both in prayer and in daily life. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: What have you heard (in church or outside of church) about the supernatural birth of Jesus? About Mary? Read Matthew 1:25, 12:46-50, 13:55-57. Do you think Mary remained a virgin after Jesus’ conception and birth? Why or why not? Read Luke 1: 38. How does Mary’s response to God’s announcement strike you? What do you think about God’s way of changing Mary & Joseph’s plans? Read the passages from Hebrews 2 & 4 above. What aspect of Jesus’ priestly ministry (sympathy, sacrifice, help, mercy, confidence) do you feel most in need of? How could the picture of Jesus in Hebrews change how you pray, and what you pray about? “‘The child to be born will be called holy, the angel Gabriel told Mary.' The New Testament expresses the significance of this in a variety of ways. These safeguard us from a fairly common assumption Christians make, namely that Jesus' combination of divinity and perfect sanctity made life somehow easier for him . . . The truth is in many respects the very reverse. Swimming against the tide is never easier. Being spiritually sensitive makes this sinful world a much more painful place in which to live.” - Sinclair Ferguson & Derek Thomas, Ichthus “When I pray, I am not praying to a philosophically complicated absentee creator. When I manage to pay attention to the continual love song, I am not trying to envisage the impossible-to-imagine domain beyond the universe. I do not picture kings, thrones, crystal pavements, or any of the possible cosmological updatings of these things. I look across, not up; I look into the world, not out or away. When I pray I see a face, a human face among other human faces. It is a face in an angry crowd, a crowd engorged by the confidence that it is doing the right thing, that it is being virtuous. The man in the middle of the crowd does not look virtuous. He looks tired and frightened and battered by the passions around him. But he is the crowd’s focus and center. The center of everything, in fact, because if you are a Christian you do not believe that the characteristic action of the God of everything is to mold the course of the universe powerfully from afar. For a Christian, the most essential thing God does in time, in all of human history, is to be that man in the crowd; a man under arrest, and on his way to our common catastrophe.”- Francis Spufford, Unapologetic