But this morning, continuing in systematic theology, picking up where we left off last week, we're looking at the Trinity, at Jesus the Son, the second person of the Trinity, and we are looking at the Incarnation, Part 2 of the Incarnate Christ. Fitting for this time of year, and not in any way planned out by me in advance to be these weeks that we're talking about these things, but very fitting for this time of year. But as we talk about the incarnation of Christ, about Christ becoming a man, God taking on human flesh, we're going to talk about this morning the virgin birth, we're going to talk about some of the signs and the titles that come along with Christ being fully human and fully divine, and then we're going to do a quick overview of some of the heresies that center around the person and the work of Christ, most of which were settled in the early church councils by about 475 A.D. as people in the church argued that out, and we'll talk about one council where the real actual Saint Nicholas was in attendance. But as we go, the first gospel announcement, the first mention of the hope of the gospel, we find it in Genesis 3.15. And that's significant because it's Genesis 3 where we see the fall. And we're not even a paragraph into the fall of Adam and Eve. And already, even with the pronouncement of the curse, is the first promise of the gospel, that in Genesis 3.15, stating that the victorious offspring who will defeat the serpent will not be the offspring of a man. Now that's significant for us because every genealogy but one in all of the Scriptures is always the father begetting the son, all the way down the line as you follow the lines of the genealogies. But Genesis 3.15, with the curse comes the promise for Eve, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed, he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel." Here we see the seed of a woman, and of course the question is there, that's not how this works. The beginning is always from the man and through that family line, so what is God talking about? Well, Galatians 4 tells us, "...when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman." By omitting any relationship to Adam, here in the line, in the genealogy, God is telling us that the promised offspring will not partake of Adam's sin. And this is what's crucial because when Adam sinned, all of us who were in Adam, who have descended from Adam by natural descent, we inherit at conception, not at birth, at conception, we inherit that sin nature and the consequences of Adam's sin. in our place. 1 Corinthians 5.21 then tells us, For since by man came death, by man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive. When we talk then about the virgin birth, not only is this also a doctrine that can be absolutely contorted and twisted, but when we talk about the virgin birth, this is critical and it's crucial to the very foundation of the gospel and to our faith. Both the first Adam and the second Adam, who is called the last Adam, Jesus, were fathered by God. In Luke 3.23 we read, Now Jesus himself began his ministry at about thirty years of age, being, as was supposed, the son of Joseph. But as it goes through his genealogy, verse 38, traces it back, the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God. You realize then that there were only two men in the history of the world created like that by God, without the physical components of a conception from a mom and a dad. It was Adam and it was Christ. In Matthew 1, as we read the genealogy, Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. So even in Matthew and in Luke, when we get the list of all of the men, beginning all of the men all the way back to Adam and all through the line of David, to prove these things, by the time you get right down to the birth of Christ, we skip from Joseph to Mary. and it was through the woman that Christ was born. In verse 18 there, the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows, and by the way, in Genesis 1.18, the word for birth there is the Greek word Genesis. You don't have to translate it. We translate it birth. It is the word Genesis, the beginning. So the Old Testament, in the beginning God created. In the New Testament, in the beginning, Here's Christ. Christ is the Genesis of the New Testament. Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows. After his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found with child of the Holy Spirit. So all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which is translated, God with us. And Isaiah 7.14, of course, "...therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign. Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call His name Immanuel." The question there is, is the word used in the Greek and in the Hebrew, is that actually the word virgin? The answer is yes. Can it be translated differently? Yes, with other adjectives and modifiers in the context, it can mean just a young woman. But usually when this term appears in Scripture, it appears with the following modifier, having not known a man. So we know specifically here that this word is used to designate that Mary was a virgin. And in fact, if Matthew and Luke are not dependable when they tell us about Mary's pregnancy, then their entire history of Jesus becomes suspect. We lose that sufficiency and infallibility and inspiration of Scripture. If Jesus was not born without a human male parentage, then He could not have been sinless. If He had been Joseph's biological child, He would have inherited Adam's sin nature, and would not have been sinless, and therefore could not have been God. It absolutely destroys who Christ is. Do you see then why liberals and atheists want to deny the virgin birth? Because if you deny the virgin birth, you're not just denying how Christ came to be born. You understand that to deny the virgin birth is to deny who Christ is, both in His divinity and in His humanity. And if He was not sinless, He could not have suffered as a substitute for fallen men and women before God. He would not have been the spotless Lamb of God, and He would not have been capable of paying the penalty for our sin. Now, of course, the attack on Christ is the attack on original sin, and if we can wipe out the first 11 chapters of Genesis, then there's no need for a Savior anyway, and if we can do that, we can just get rid of God altogether. And this, of course, is the wish of the fallen mind to repress the knowledge of God, to deny the truth that we know that's written on our hearts. The virgin birth also allows for the pre-existence of the second person of the Trinity. Jesus existed before He was conceived in Mary's womb. He did not come into existence at that point in time. in essence and in His being, eternal God, but He was miraculously conceived then in Mary's womb as a human being. So He existed as a Son and He was born as a child. This is why we understand that words matter, because Isaiah 9.6 says, For unto us a child is born. His humanity was joined to Him at that conception. Jesus became the possessor of a human body and soul. But, it doesn't just say, unto us a child is born. It says, unto us a son is given. Meaning the Son was already there. He didn't become the Son at His incarnation. He was already the Son of God. He was eternally the Son of God, and He was given to us in human form as a result of the virgin birth. So Jesus took on a human body, and 1 John 4, 1-3 and 2 John 7 tell us it is Antichrist, the spirit of Antichrist, that says that He did not come in the flesh. He took on flesh in order to put away sin. Now, the questions that arise about twisting this whole doctrine, understanding the purposes of Mary conceiving as a virgin, it is now taught by the Catholic Church that Mary was perpetually a virgin. And in fact, Catholic teaching proposes that Mary was miraculously conceived herself without sin. And so now she is perpetually a virgin, she was bodily assumed into heaven, now is the co-mediatrix of the New Covenant, the co-redeemer, and now the latest pope has declared, Mary can save you without Jesus' input. If Jesus says, no, I'm not saving that one, Mary says, well fine, I will. So who needs Jesus? All of this is an attack on the work of Christ, on the sufficient work of Christ and the sufficiency of Scripture. According to Scripture, Mary was a sinner in need of her Son as a Savior, just like the rest of us. When we read, "...all have sinned, and there is none good but God," that includes Mary, the mother of Jesus. We do know also, by the way, that Mary and Joseph had other children, and this was the funnest part of my research this week, to read the theories about how you deal with this. Because Mark 6, 3, people ask, is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us, so they were offended at him? Jesus is questioned in Mark and in Matthew, and people know that he had four brothers and two sisters, at least at this point in time. So Jesus grew up in a household of seven kids, at least, and we've got their names. His brother Judas, you understand this, I'm sure, after the resurrection, he changed his name to Jude, right? Judas, known as Jude, wrote the Epistle of Jude. His brother James led the church at Jerusalem and wrote the Epistle of James, part of the interesting story about James and about the brothers of Jesus. They didn't believe. And in fact, at some points in the Gospel, were actually hostile toward Christ. The best commentary on this that I saw was actually in a sermon that MacArthur preached about James, specifically as he was preaching through the leaders of the New Testament Church. And as he preached about James, getting ready to preach the book of James, he made an interesting point. Can you imagine growing up in a house with Jesus as your older brother? You think sibling rivalry is bad when all the kids are fallen. Imagine when one is divine. Imagine when your older brother really is perfect. Imagine when your older brother really can do no wrong, never disciplined, never disappoints, wanders off and gets lost in the temple teaching the priest, panics everybody. But can you imagine how many times James and Jude and the other brothers heard, why can't you be more like your brother? He was perfect. He knew who he was. He knew what he was there to do. And we know this because at the age of 12 he was teaching them in the temple and he said, I must be about my father's business. And he didn't mean carpentry. He knew. Now you can imagine growing up like that, what kind of resentment might have been there. It's significant then. that in the list of people that Jesus appeared to after the resurrection, because think about this, in the garden, during the trial, at the cross, His brothers were not there. His mother was there. And Jesus, looking down from the cross, gave him into John's care, because there wasn't another family member to have been there. We think at that point in time, Joseph had already passed away, because he's not involved in any of that. And so it would have fallen to James, who was the second born in the family, to be taking care of mom, if Jesus was taken out of the scene. And instead, Jesus is assigning the care of his mother to his disciple John, because his brothers are not there. So when Jesus begins appearing to people after the resurrection, in that list, you know, it says that He appeared also to James, and then to the rest of the apostles. Not James the apostle and then the other apostles. James, His brother. Can you imagine that meeting? Can you imagine first-born Jesus, crucified and raised, meeting unbelieving second-born brother James in his resurrection body, and we see his conversion, we see what has changed in his life, because then James becomes the leader, the lead pastor, so to speak, the lead elder at the church at Jerusalem, and serves faithfully until he is martyred for his faith. wrote for us the book of James and was martyred. Jude also was believed to have been martyred as well in Syria. But as we look at this, then we ask the question, if we see that the Bible gives us his brothers and talks about his sisters, and we know, in fact, Galatians 1.19, Paul, after he was saved, I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother. He didn't call the rest of the apostles the Lord's brothers. He called James the Lord's brother to denote which James he was talking about. So here's what the Catholic Church says. Joseph had children by his first wife who died before he met Mary. And it's supposed that Joseph didn't live long enough to see Jesus' ministry because supposedly to make this work, Joseph was 80 years old when he ran off with 14-year-old Mary to Bethlehem. Boy, that makes for a wonderful story, doesn't it? Others say they were cousins. Others say that they were some other just close family members that happened to live in the same household and so they grew up together so they were considered brothers. No. The only reason to say he doesn't have brothers and sisters is to elevate Mary to a point of adoration and worship that belongs only to Christ. It's to make an idol out of her. He had brothers. He had sisters. She was not perpetually a virgin, but she was when Christ was conceived. And as she was then, He did not bear that fallen human nature. He bore human nature. He had a full, truly human nature, but not marred by sin, just like Adam and Eve in the garden before the fall. When we look at the human titles for Jesus to see that He really was human, you realize that even His name, His being named Jesus in Matthew 1.21, He is named Jesus for He will save His people from their sins. And the name Yeshua translated to us, Jesus, means the deliverer or deliverance. His name means salvation. He was a Nazarene, not a Nazarite. There's a lot of confusion around that. The Nazirite, the vows in the Old Testament, we know Samson, we know Samuel, others, there were vows that were taken, not to cut their hair, not to drink fruit of the vine, not to drink wine, all of these other things that they had to do and couldn't do, couldn't touch in special service to the Lord. No, he was called a Nazarene because he grew up in Nazareth. It'd be like you grew up in Texas, you're a Texan. That's just it. He was a Nazarene growing up in Nazareth. He was the son of David, tracing that line. Interestingly, by the way, he fulfills that line of being in David's family from both Joseph, his stepfather, and Mary, his mother. that both of them follow that line of descent to make Him royal, to be able to sit on the throne of David. Jesus' favorite title for Himself, He uses this title for Himself more, talking about Himself, than any other title in the Gospels, is the Son of Man. Now, if to call yourself the Son of God makes yourself equal with God, what does it mean to call yourself the Son of Man? It means you're man. So He was identifying as God in human flesh. 1 Corinthians and Romans call Him the last Adam. There was the first Adam who sinned, and He is the last Adam, because His work is complete and redeeming us. And He is the mediator. There is one mediator between God and man, the man, Christ Jesus. So He is fully human. He's also referred to as the Lion of the tribe of Judah and the Root of David. Again, looking at His lineage as an Israelite in the tribe of Judah and in the family line of David. So that brings us to a discussion of the hypostatic union. Well, that's a big fancy word. What does that mean? It means that Jesus was one person with two natures. And that's critical to understand how He existed in the Incarnation. He was the second person. He had a divine nature. In essence, equal with God the Father. When He was conceived in Mary's womb, He took on a full human nature. So He was fully God and fully man, truly God and truly man, however you choose to phrase that out. He had both natures. Those have to be maintained, though, as distinct. In A.D. 325, the Council of Nicaea affirmed Scripture's revelation of Jesus as being truly God. And in 451, the Council of Chalcedon agreed that Jesus was, at the same time, human and divine. involving what they phrase the hypostatic union of the two natures without confusion, change, division, or separation. Meaning Jesus as one person, in essence, equal with God the Father, took on humanity, and so had a divine nature and a human nature, two separate natures, joined but not mixed, not confused, not commingled. How in the world do you do that? Well, that's the miracle of the incarnation. We see this, if you want to see this demonstrated in the scripture, this is Jesus praying in the garden. When He tells the disciples, watch and pray with Me, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. You see, with each nature came an independent will. Jesus had the will of God and He had the will of man. And following obedience to the Spirit and to the plan of God, He was ready to face crucifixion and the wrath of God in separation from the Father. As a man, He didn't want to die. And He told the disciples, I need you to pray with me and for me, because my spirit is willing to go do what I have to go do, but my flesh is struggling, facing the cross. And yet we see every time he does what he did, he subjected the human nature to the divine. He subjected his will to the will of the Father. Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done. So the union of his two natures then maintains his deity undiminished and his humanity unexalted, meaning he really was God. and He really was a man. That means He really was sinless and maintained that sinlessness, but He could be tempted. There are those who say that Jesus couldn't have been tempted because He couldn't sin. And there are people who would tell you that Jesus could have sinned, or else the temptation wasn't real. If Jesus could have sinned, He was not God, because God cannot sin. It's impossible. He can't. It's contrary to His nature. So if Jesus has a divine nature, He cannot sin. If He has a human nature, how does He... How does he get away with not sinning? By yielding that human nature to the divine nature. It's not that he couldn't, the point is he was tempted, just like we've talked about, you can be tempted to do things that you cannot do. I have been tempted before to eat a full gallon. I know now why Bluebell comes in a half gallon. Because if you eat it all, that half gallon is more than enough. There have been times I've eyed that other half gallon, because you know it's always buy one, get one, right? It's always buy one, get one, and you can't just take one and leave one. I mean, come on, that's just wasting God's glory. Come on, God gave us these good gifts to enjoy. It comes to you. Stop it. Get thee behind me. The pint is the temptation. Do you think you can just eat this? Yeah, I know. You're tempted to do things that you can't do. All the time. We are. That's just built within us as human beings. We want to do things we can't do. The problem is we're tempted to do things that we can do, and we do do them. And that's where we get into trouble. So Jesus was tempted. His deity was undiminished, but His humanity was unexalted, meaning He really was a man. And the Incarnation refers to the whole concept of God manifesting Himself in human flesh. The virgin birth, then, constituted the means by which the Incarnation was accomplished, and the hypostatic union was brought into being by the Incarnation. The human nature received by Christ in His Incarnation allows Him to experience humanity, but He does not exist as two persons. He remains one person with two natures. Jesus, as a human, experienced birth, growth, exhaustion, sleep, hunger, thirst, anger, sorrow, compassion, love, joy, temptation, suffering, and death. He also experienced first what all other humans will eventually experience, and that is the resurrection. He was the first to be raised. And you understand, it's not only the righteous who are raised in the resurrection at the end. The lost are raised as well. for judgment, and the saved are raised for eternal life in the new heavens and the new earth. Hebrews 2.17 reminds us, Therefore, in all things he had to be made like his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, and to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself has suffered, being tempted, he is able to aid those who are tempted. If you are suffering and fighting against being tired and angry and hungry and thirsty and sad and grieved, He knows. He's been there. He's done that. This tells us something important, by the way, for our Christian walk and for our sanctification. It is not a sin to be tempted. Jesus was tempted yet without sin. You can be tempted and not sin. Where we get into trouble is we start playing with that temptation. And that's why we're told that lust then conceives, in James 1, it conceives and gives birth to sin. Temptation opens the door, but you've got to walk through it. So as you are tempted, and we mortify the deeds of the flesh and the lust of the flesh, it sounds easy, but just say no. Just say no in Jesus' name. Go to the Word, go to other believers, get help, get accountability. Do you wonder why it is that when we're tempted we're usually alone? And why it is when we're tempted we don't want to talk to anybody else and let them know? It's because our flesh and the devil both know that if he can... You've seen what lions do to get an animal out of the herd, right? They find the one that's sick, that's weak, that's young, that can't keep up, and they separate it from the herd, and then they kill it and eat it. Satan's a roaring lion. This is how he hunts. Separate us from our strength. Separate us from the herd. Separate us from the other sheep. We need to stick together in the fight against sin. There is a question, when we look at the divine nature and the human nature of Christ, there is a question about Christ's limited knowledge. Because in Mark 13 we read, "...but of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." Speaking about the day of Christ's return. And Jesus, in His incarnation, says, nobody knows but the Father. I think the best way to understand this is that this was during the time of His incarnation, thus during the time of, as we read it in Philippians, His humiliation, wherein He was limited by His humanity and yet able to exercise divine attributes at the Father's direction. He still knew men's hearts and minds and knew conversations that were taking place in people's heads, But that was at the will of the Father. He had humbled Himself, He had limited Himself, so at the point that He spoke these words, He did not know when He was coming back. I guarantee you, He knows now. He's elevated the right hand of the throne of God, holding everything together. He has been glorified. He knows. In fact, Acts 1.6, It says, Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom of Israel? After the resurrection, the disciples said, Now are you going to do it? Now are you going to free us from Rome? Now are you going to restore the kingdom? And He said to them, It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority. In other words, the feeling of the way this is phrased really is that Jesus knew now, but He wasn't telling anybody. I understand that. Their first question, all right, what are you going to do what you came to do? And they totally missed it. He had done what he had came to do. and He was going to come again to accomplish the rest. But now He says the Father knows, it's under His authority, so now I do believe Christ in His glorified state knows when He is coming back. So this does not at all injure the idea of Christ being fully divine not to know something that the Father did not reveal to Him in His humanity. He simply did not know at that point in time because He had willingly yielded that to become a man. When we look then, just an overview quickly of Christological heresies, all of them attack the person or the work of Christ, especially His nature in persons. They really do try to change who He is. Ebionism states that Jesus was not divine nor preexistent. He was merely a man, although a powerful prophet and a good teacher. We hear this all the time still today, don't we? Jesus was a good teacher. Jesus was a prophet. Jesus was a good man. No, it's a denial that he was divine and that he was not pre-existent. Gnosticism teaches that matter is evil and spirit is good from the school of thinking from Plato. Thus Jesus was an emanation from God, far removed from him. In other words, God had to create a being that was less spirit and more matter than he was. But that was probably still too much spirit and not enough matter, so it couldn't be a human. And the idea of Gnostics actually teach that there are thousands of these emanations from God. And finally, one was created out there that had just enough matter to be human and just enough spirit to be good. And that's Jesus finding the perfect mix in a Gnostic universe. So He was a created being. And they actually do still deny, some Gnostics deny, that He actually had a human body. They can't fathom that God could possess a human body because that would be evil and be subjecting Him to evil. So they literally refer to Christ as a phantom, a ghost, or an apparition. not really existing in the flesh. Adoptionism teaches that God adopted the man Jesus as His Son at baptism. That there was a good man that God said, ìYouíre it.î And when he was baptized, he was filled with the Spirit and became the Son of God. And when he was crucified, just before he died, the Spirit left him. So the man died alone, not actually Christ, not actually divine, when he died. That's also an example of modalism. Docetism teaches that Christ was divine but not human. He only appeared to be human. He had no body so that he could not die. And in fact, he was merely an illusion. So God just put on a show for everybody. Arianism teaches that Christ was a created being not equal with God in essence or being. And in fact, when you look at the council, And I'm going to cheat here. When we look at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 that did defend the fact that Jesus was fully God, there was in attendance a bishop named Arius who denied that. There was in attendance another bishop named Saint Nicholas. Yes, the same St. Nicholas from which the legend of Santa Claus is mirrored. We don't know if this is historically true or not. Church tradition says that during one of his long arguments, denying the deity of Christ, that Arius was speaking and speaking and speaking, and St. Nicholas finally got so frustrated with it, he walked across the room and punched him in the face. So if you've seen those on Facebook now, it's, you know, Santa Claus punching a heretic. The true Saint Nicholas, the question is, did he actually really punch Arius the heretic? The favorite one I've seen is that Saint Nicholas is passing out presents to children and punching heretics and he's all out of presents. So, did it really happen? Don't know. What we do know, they both were there and we do know that Nicholas argued against Arius and we know that Arius lost and was condemned as a heretic. and that the orthodox understanding of Christ and His deity was proclaimed at that council. Apollinarianism teaches that Christ was divine and did possess a real body, but was just God masquerading in human flesh. Basically, God took a human body and used it like a puppet. He was in the body, manipulating it, but didn't take it as His own body, so when the body died, He actually didn't die. All these explanations to try to... You wonder where these hairy tics come from. They abound. Nestorianism asserted that each nature dictated an individual person. So, Jesus was two persons with two natures in one body. Jesus was not God in human flesh, but by virtue of his virgin birth was a deified human being. A man who became God, not God who became a man. You see how that just flips it on its head? And eudaicheism teaches a fusing together of the divine and human natures as one nature that was neither fully God nor fully man, but a third hybrid of the two that was a deified human nature. It's crucial to understand that it was within 300 years of the birth of the New Testament church that all of these things had been denied by the elders, by the bishops in the church, even before the origination, by the way, of the so-called Roman Catholic Church. This was in early church history. Nicaea in 325 defended the deity of Christ and opposed Arius and Arianism. Constantinople in AD 381 defended the deity of Christ, opposed Arianism and Apollinarianism. That was Arianism Round 2. The Council of Ephesus in AD 431 defended the two natures of Christ and opposed Nestorianism. Chalcedon, which by the way, the Chalcedonian Creed, you can look that up, Google the Chalcedonian Creed 451, one of my favorite creeds because it's so specific, defending the two natures of Christ, opposing Apollinarianism, Nestorianism, Eudachism, and Monophysitism. Constantinople II defended the two natures of Christ and opposed eudaicheism and monotheism again. And Constantinople III defended the two natures of Christ and opposed monotheism. I didn't even get into what all that means. And Nicaea II defended the use of icons. So the first councils were good. That last one, sorry, that's when they had veered off and gone too far. and they started defending things that should not have been defended. But what we see is that the church, early on, wrestled with the scriptures and what the scripture taught about who Christ is, and the consequences of your view of who Christ is. Is He, the second person of the Trinity, pre-existent and eternal being? equal with God the Father, in essence God, who became a man, joined to Himself a human body, possessed that body as His body, taking on a human nature, remaining sinless, although tempted like we are, and then going to the cross to pay that price as a sinless, spotless Lamb of God, taking our sin upon Himself. If Christ had sinned, who's sin would He have died for? His own. He couldn't have died for ours. He would have had His own. So all of these things are crucial to understanding not only who He is, but understanding the gospel and what we need in a Savior. We don't just need a good teacher, or a prophet, or a moral example. We don't need somebody who was just adopted by the Spirit of God and illumined and used as a puppet to try to further and advance the kingdom. We need a Savior who is the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. The second person of the Trinity, who through the incarnation was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary, born to her in Bethlehem, and grew up limiting himself as a man, so that he might live as a man, and sympathize with us in our fight against sin, against our fight against ourselves and our own nature. You understand, human nature and some of the things that we want are not necessarily bad things. It's not a bad thing to be hungry. That's a lust, that's a desire of the body. When you get hungry, when you get thirsty, those are fleshly desires. Well, it's not bad to fulfill those things in order to support life. What's bad is when we abuse those things, when we let those things rule us, and Christ demonstrates that He was not ruled by His flesh, but submitted Himself to the Father. So He became the perfect example for us of what it means to be a child of God, knowing that we cannot attain to that until glorification. And this painful process of sanctification only hurts because we're still in these fleshly bodies that are fallen. As we fight against sin then, remember who Christ is, remember His natures, remember that He is God in human flesh, remember that He is human, and so He understands. It's one of the reasons we're to come to Him. One of the reasons He now, in His ministry, sitting at the right hand of the throne of God, intercedes for us, because He can understand what we're going through because He's been there, and so He prays for us before the Father. Do you understand that the Son and the Spirit are both interceding for you before the throne of the grace? Now here's when you need to remember that. When you're stretched to your absolute wits end to fight against self and sin and you don't know what you're going to do, remember that if nobody else on this earth is praying for you, Jesus and the Spirit are. Several people have said it. How powerful would it be to hear Jesus praying for you? And yet He tells us that He is. So believe it, because it's true. This is who He is. This is His ministry as the mediator, the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. Fully and truly God, fully and truly man, through the Incarnation, sent to be born of the Virgin to save us from sin. Let's thank Him this morning. Father, we do thank You for sending Your Son. We thank You that unto us a child has been born and unto us a son has been given. fully God and fully man, not just a deified human being, not just a phantom or an apparition, but a true man and truly God sent to save us from our sin. Father, I pray that you would guard our minds and our hearts against fear and against doubt, against these heresies that would twist who Jesus is and what he's come to do, who would take away the need that we have for a savior. We confess we need a Savior. We thank you that you've sent Christ and that He has saved us. We pray during this time of year, as the world celebrates this incarnation, that you would use us as salt and as light to explain this miracle and the reason for blessings and good tidings and joy. It is because you have sent your Son to seek and to save that which is lost. Remind us this was His mission from the start, You brought him to be born at a specific time and a specific place according to plan. We thank you then that you are God and there is no other. We pray these things this morning in Jesus' name. Amen.