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THE CHRISTMAS MIRACLE, PART ONE:
A TIMELESS KIND OF WONDER

by Jack Hayford

THE WORDS “I’m pregnant” never fail to attract attention. From joy to guilt, or from “Happy-to-be” to “What-will-happen-to me?” the full spectrum of emotions surrounds the subject of pregnancy.

A pregnancy is the ultimate analogy. Everything in life is “like” it. As with a pregnancy, everything in life starts with a possibility and proceeds to a reality. The pattern of conception-to-delivery is rooted in the founding fundamentals of God’s operational order of things. And life always is a miracle. To see life’s miracle possibilities most clearly, I’m pointing to the most incredible and important pregnancy in history: Mary’s. But don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a story only for women or about babies. The “Mary miracle” can touch any person. It’s just as likely to happen to a man as a woman.

The God who chose a virgin girl as the avenue through whom He would miraculously give mankind His greatest gift is still working that “Mary” kind of miracle today. That is to say: What the Almighty did then in the physical/biological realm – supernaturally begetting life, promise and hope where none existed – He is fully ready and able to do now in virtually any realm.

He does this same kind of thing today – in marriages, in businesses, in hearts, minds and souls. Where life or love, hope or strength, promise or patience have disappeared – or never been present at all – He comes to offer the Mary miracle. It’s a timeless kind of wonder that is still being worked by our changeless heavenly Father.

It isn’t mystical, though it is miraculous. That’s probably the hardest part to explain because our human disposition is to turn God’s imminent availability to us into a distant improbability. Most people I meet believe He’s there somewhere, but hardly here – now – for them. Too many think the Mary miracle is only for the “Saint Marys.” and reasoning men and women tend to conclude that even if there is more than one Saint Mary, “I certainly don’t qualify!”

“Me? A candidate for a visit from God? The Almighty offering me the promise of things I feel are totally outside the scope of probability if not possibility?”

But I am writing to that very kind of person – the thinker who wonders if God is that direct, personal or ready to visit them. And the answer is yes – to you! In spite of our finiteness, our fallibility and our fears, you and I are candidates for such a visitation because qualifying for the Mary miracle doesn’t require a self-accomplished goodness. It only call us to be open to a God-appointed grace.

The Mary miracle calls us all to come back to a moment when eternity penetrated time with the power that can change all our days and hours, our lives – past, present and future. That incredible encounter – when Jewish maiden named Mary was met with divine grace in a dusty town called Nazareth two thousand years ago – set forward more than the incarnation of the world’s Savior.

Mary’s miracle opens the promise – indeed, the pathway – for God to incarnate His gracious purpose and power in the experience of anyone who will open to the same order of miracle. Because God is no respecter of persons (see Acts 10:34), He shows what He can do in some lives, as a sample of what He can do in all lives. He does these apparently “occasional wonders,” not to preempt our hopes for the same, but to promote them. So in Mary He brought to reality the ultimate hope – Jesus – and in doing that He pointed not only to the way of salvation, but also to the possibilities of “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27, italics added).

That “order of miracle” – that genre, dimension or type called the “Mary Miracle” – is not solely defined by the astounding physical reality of the supernatural conception Mary experienced. Because even then the miracle wasn’t only physical. Beyond that biologically transcendent event, when a real child was generated within a virgin womb by the creative power of God’s declared Word, heaven came down to us.

Heaven came to touch your world and mine, as well as Mary’s. Not only in the broad and sweeping ways we usually concede when we appropriately affirm the beauty of the fact: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). But with and beyond so great salvation, in the most intimate and personal ways, the Mary miracle holds the promised potential of heaven’s entry into all our life circumstances – yours and mine.

I want to press this precious point. The Mary miracle was never intended to be only Mary’s! Just as surely as the Savior she bore is for each of us to receive personally, so is the type of miracle she experienced. The Mary miracle contains a pattern for possibilities, a template of truth: Miracles are intended to happen within, through and around you and me, too!

Being Open to God’s Unlimited Possibilities

I am deeply committed to helping people to be open, as Mary was, to God’s divine possibilities for their personal lives. This means we need to be open to God’s miracle grace and power; to the way He calls us all to break through the intellectual membrane that tends to separate our minds from our hearts. The Holy Spirit wants to press into the innermost sanctuary of our lives, where daily realities brutally frame situations that either disintegrate our dreams and incarcerate our hopes.

Those difficult, tough or problematic things that invade homes, work, family, minds and habit have a way of taking over, of dictating restricted dimensions. Too readily we submit to them, supposing “this is how I guess it’s intended to be.” But the Holy Spirit is ready to bring us through and beyond those “controlling or limiting circumstances,” as we call them.

What are yours?

Every honest person knows they are there. Life unaided by divine grace does have limits, but they are by no means all ordained by God, whose unlimited power invited us beyond life’s limits. However, He – the Living God – is essential to our transcending such limits, difficulties or barricades. Exceeding life’s apparent limitations is more than a matter of mental attitude, of visualizing better things, of thing a good thought or wishing on a star.

Mary’s miracle was neither spawned by human seed nor generated by a mystic style of meditation. She had neither sexual intercourse nor an intellectual enlightenment because the Mary miracle is neither physical nor mental in its source. It is from God, the creator of all, coming to us individually to say, “I’m not finished creating yet.”

The Fountainhead Miracle

The Mary miracle is the fountainhead miracle; it’s the beginning of all God’s wonder-works of redemption. Redemption is the beautiful word that embraces all of God’s divine program of recovery: His reclaiming the lost, forgiving the sinful and then setting about to fulfill His purposes in each one who will receive His offer of love and life. That’s what redemption is all about.

It didn’t start in a manger in Bethlehem, but in a womb in Nazareth. Even more precisely, it began before all time in the mind of the eternal Father. From the fountainhead of God’s redeeming grace, the Mary miracle flowed from heaven to earth, from out of eternity into time. And here, within time, that miracle began to take shape in a Galilean girl who was stunned by the wonder of what had come to her. That summarized the way the Mary miracle begins in, and flows forward with, anyone.

The Mary miracle starts with the living God ready to work something of His releasing grace, and continues with His finding someone willing to become an instrument of that grace. It is best understood by looking closely at the incredible starting point of all redemption’s miracles: the Incarnation.

What happened in the willingness of God to accept temporary housing in a womb, in order to bring eternal promise into the world, is, of course, the theme of Christmas. But it is the source of every other holy day as well, for no other date on the calendar of our holy celebrations would exist without the beginning – the birth. There are no miracles without the Mary miracle.

Furthermore, the story of the glory revealed in Jesus Christ our Savior has another incredible feature. In addition to God’s willingness to come to us is the overarching phenomenon of His coming through a human conduit. The Mary miracle reminds us that God Himself has chosen no beginning point for His wonder-workings apart from human beings. In Mary, He demonstrated His readiness and willingness to work through an imperfect human vessel, and He is still unashamed to do the same.

Mary was the first person to experience this order of being chosen, of becoming a vehicle of redemption’s fullest and highest expression of grace. Consider this: God’s redemptive promise was:

• brought to her: the angel’s announcement;
• to grow in her: the miraculous conception;
• to be delivered through her: that first Christmas;
• to change the world around her: through Calvary’s triumph.

It Starts with the Mary Miracle

The Mary miracle starts it all. This is crucially important to see. To see that miracle for all its worth is to do more than give appropriated and humble gratitude for the fact that God came to us, becoming incarnate as a man – a transcendent wonder!
To see the implications of the Mary miracle is to do more that receive the Savior; yielding to faith in Jesus as both – the miracle-working Master and dying-to-rise-again Savior – a redeeming wonder!

But please distinguish these wonders from yet another. Because to see the Mary miracle clearly is not only to receive and believe the gift we have been given through the miracle of Christ’s incarnation and work of salvation. It is also to see the way God works redemptively – it is to grasp the continuing wonder.

God’s choice to use Mary, a mere human vessel through which to unfold His wonder-working toward mankind, discloses an incredible fact. God thereby revealed His willingness to bring His promises to nest in fallen human vessels. If they will open to such grace, He is ready to change their world – through them! To see and grasp this is to pave the way for the Mary miracle to occur over and over again. It is to see how God, through His promise of life in Jesus Christ, is still seeking to bring His promise to, in and through us, to change things around us.

The Mary miracle opened a river of revealed grace: God is pleased to use humans – wonderfully! To emphasize that wonder is not to minimize the uniqueness of the wonder Mary delivered. Jesus is the Redeemer and, as such, is the Most Wonderful. But neither let us minimize the promise, the hope, that Mary’s miracle affords us because the Father is still looking for human vessels through whom He can further His redemptive purposes.

The fountainhead miracle is the Mary miracle, because the fount of redemption – Jesus Himself – came to us through that wonder. But the river is still flowing, and God’s Spirit is calling us all to move into the stream.

There are promises He wants to bring to you, (concerning arenas of need, hope or longing you are aware of, where God’s power and grace are needed);
…which promises He want to grow in you, (as you receive His Word and entertain the possibility that there is nothing too hard for God);
…that He may work His promised wonders through you, (as a humble vessel, submitted to His grace and dependent upon His sufficiency and power);
…in order to change the world around you (be it your family, your relationships, your neighborhood, city or nation, your church or your circumstance).

And all this takes time…sometimes more than we would like. But, then, it took Mary nine months.
Or was it thirty years?

* * * * *
For Part Two of this article, click here.

For Part Three of this article, click here.

For Part Four of this article, click here.


(This article is one in a four-part series we have posted on Children of Destiny's website. This material has been excerpted from The Christmas Miracle by Jack Hayford, © Copyright 1999, Regal Books, Ventura, CA 93003. Used by Permission.)

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