I Believe Jesus Was Conceived Of The Holy Spirit Born Of The Virgin Mary

“I Believe Jesus Was Conceived of the Holy Spirit, Born of the Virgin Mary” “The angel answered, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God’” (Luke 1:35). Today we are looking at the part of the Apostles’ Creed which states: “I believe in Jesus Christ … who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.” We tend to just consider this during the Christmas season, But we are considering it today because the early Christians deemed this truth so highly that they included it in the first Christian creed. Because of its importance, I want to go over what this means, and what is at stake. When we affirm the Christian faith through the Apostles’ Creed, we are making a claim about Jesus, grounded in the Holy Bible, that cannot be made about any other person. It is a claim that could not be made about anyone else. I want to go over this with you today by considering 4 questions: 1. What exactly do we mean when we say that Jesus was “conceived by the Holy Spirit” and “born of the virgin Mary?” 2. How could the God, Who is limitless, somehow “empty himself” and enter the world as a human being born of a human mother? 3. What difference does it make that Jesus was “conceived by the Holy Spirit,” and “born of the Virgin Mary?” A. Biblical Authority: Will we believe what Scripture plainly teaches? B. Jesus Christ: the Virgin Birth forces us to confront what we believe about Jesus Christ. C. Salvation: The actuality of the Virgin Birth makes salvation entirely by grace. God does it all because we could not do any of it. 4. Why did God go to all this trouble? The “Why?” of all of this is found right there in the Bible, in Jesus’ own words: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that Whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” John 3:16