Random Pregnancies

Pregnancies. I took some comfort in the fact that all of us would be well aware of pregnancy. After all, we all were the result of one. We all, and some of us have caused some. So pregnancies are something that is, you know, well known to us, and when we go to the scriptures now and we look at some pregnancies, then there is a link there for us in a primal way.

I don't mean that in a bad sense, but in a sense there is something here that we can identify with. Because it's Advent season and in the New Testament there are two pregnancies we're going to look at this morning, and we're going to go, in the first place, to the Gospel of Luke, to Luke chapter one, and read of the amazing things that happened there. We're going to pick it up at verse five. Luke has done his introduction to his mate, Theophilus. He said, I've done my research, pal, and this is what I've found.

So in verse five of Luke chapter one: In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah of the division of Abijah, and he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all commandments and statutes of the Lord, but they had no child because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years. Now whilst he was serving as priest before God, when his division was on duty, according to the custom of the priesthood, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense.

And there appeared to him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense, and Zechariah was troubled when he saw him, and fear fell upon him. But the angel said, Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great before the Lord, and he must not drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb. And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared. And Zechariah said to the angel, How shall I know this? I'm an old man. My wife is advanced in years.

And the angel answered him, I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and bring you this good news. And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time. Well, the people were waiting for Zechariah, and they were wondering at his delay in the temple. When he came out, he was unable to speak to them, and they realised he had seen a vision in the temple, and he kept making signs to them and remained mute.

And when his time of service was ended, he went to his home. And after these days, his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she kept herself hidden, saying, Thus the Lord has done for me, in the days when He looked on me to take away my reproach among people. In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, Greetings, favoured one, the Lord is with you. But she was greatly troubled at the saying and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be.

And the angel said to her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom there will be no end. And Mary said to the angel, How will this be, since I'm a virgin? And the angel answered her, The Holy Spirit will come upon you.

The power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren, for nothing will be impossible with God. And Mary said, Behold, I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word.

And the angel departed from her. Well, in those days, Mary arose and went with haste to the hill country to a town in Judah. And she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.

And why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leapt for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her from the Lord. And let's just quickly go across to Matthew, a parallel passage, Matthew chapter one. We're just going to read from verse 18.

Matthew chapter one, verse 18: Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit, and she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.

And all this took place to fulfil what the Lord has spoken by the prophet: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us. And when Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him. He took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son, and he called his name Jesus. So one of the words in the title is pregnancies.

Another word is random. Random pregnancies. Now I was talking random, not in the modern word that some young people here might use it, something that's totally random or whatever. And I actually Googled that, you know, to try and find out what young people mean when they say that's random, because I've had grandchildren say it to me about a number of things that I've said or done.

And it's interesting, even Mister Google can't work out what it means. So that's fine. So what we're doing today is we're going with random, and we're using the classic understanding of random as unexpected or unplanned. Unexpected or unplanned. So we have these two pregnancies.

Are they random pregnancies? Now on one hand, of course they are. I mean, you have an old woman who's barren and an old husband, and no likelihood that they're going to conceive and have a child. And then on the other hand, you have this young woman betrothed to her future husband, and who is a virgin, hasn't had any sexual relationship with any man. She's a virgin, and she's with child. So on one hand, yes, they are unexpected, unplanned pregnancies.

You say, in one sense, yeah, well, random pregnancies, yeah, I'll say totally random. But on another level, on another level, they're not, are they? They're not random at all. They're not ordinary pregnancies.

In one sense, you could say, well, look at the women involved. An old barren woman and a young virgin conceiving. I mean, that's there's something going on here different to what is normality. And when you look at the text, how the scriptures reveal it, then the text is telling us that these are not random pregnancies because God is at work. And we see that in the visitation of the angel Gabriel coming to Zechariah.

Now I don't mean to be flippant, but after he said that, and okay, Zechariah was struck mute, but he wasn't struck mute. He might have walked out of the temple and said that's totally random, but I don't think he did. And on the other hand, the angel comes to Mary and she responds just totally brilliantly, totally brilliantly, amazing, amazing. But so did Joseph. That's why we read the Matthew thing, because he was a righteous man, and here is his fiancée, we would say today, she's with child, and he knows that it's not him who's the father.

So he didn't want to make a spectacle of it, so he would divorce her quietly, and so he was a righteous man. He tried to do the very much the right thing by her, but he was thinking this is this is really a bit over the top. And then what does God do? The angel comes and speaks to him and explains that He, the Almighty God, is at work. Indeed, that the one conceived by the presence and the power, the overshadowing, what a beautiful word that is, of the Holy Spirit is indeed the promised Messiah, the Christ.

And so that leads us then into the third reason that these weren't random pregnancies. Here we see the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies, even with John the Baptist. Yeah, from Isaiah 40, and so you can read of the prophecies of the one who was to come, the forerunner. And the Baptist, of course, is the last of the Old Testament prophets, amazingly prophesied, and here it is happening in this staggering way.

But even more brilliantly than that, with the conception of the Christ, we see the fulfilment of the whole of the Old Testament itself, right from the Garden of Eden on, where God promised to Satan that the Christ would come and He would crush your head. You will crush, strike His heel. We translate it strike, but check with your pastor afterwards, but it's the same word in the Hebrew, and it's crush His heel. And I think we translate crush His head and strike His heel just to sort of emphasise the total domination, the complete victory of Christ over Satan, and the striking of the heel.

It cost Him His life, but then there was resurrection beyond the cross. And then in the fourth place, if you want any more evidence that these are not random pregnancies, how about when Mary goes to visit Elizabeth? I find this one of the most exciting passages in the whole of the scripture, apart from the doing and the dying of the Christ, of course. But I mean, you imagine it? Here's Mary.

She's young. She's pregnant. She is going to be ostracised by every man and their dog, because everybody had been ostracising old Elizabeth, because they'd been saying, Uh-huh, she hasn't had any children. She's barren. Yeah.

No blessing of the Lord there. Must be something going on in the past there. Gossip, gossip, gossip. And so here comes Mary to Elizabeth, who's six months pregnant.

This old woman whose life has just been lit up gloriously by God. She has this carrying child, and Mary comes in. Don't know, she knocked on the door, but when she spoke to Elizabeth, her greeting, what happened? Now only a woman can really, really, really appreciate this. The child in the womb of Mary, who was John the Baptist, leapt for joy at the sound of Mary's voice. Oh, this is this is this is magic.

But it's, you know, it's magic's a stupid word to use. It's brilliant. It's stupendous. It's incredible. It's God at work.

Can you imagine how that was for Mary, young Mary? Here's God affirming, I am at work with you, young girl. And this says a whole lot of things about conception and the time when life begins and all of that. We'll leave all that alone today. But as Mary comes into the house of Elizabeth, the Baptist leaps in the womb of his mother, and Elizabeth is filled with the spirit of the living God.

And you can read these things. It's just beautiful. It is just totally beautiful. So there's the sermon title: random pregnancies? No way.

No way. Here is the God of all eternity, the creator, at work breaking into human history in glorious, majestic, miraculous ways far beyond our own doing or our own understanding even. These are holy pregnancies. One more holy than the other in that sense, of course. John the Baptist certainly had a role to play in the unfolding of God's redemption plan.

Glorious, glorious, glorious acts of God in humanity. Now I don't know about you, I actually have a t-shirt that says grumpy old man. So I was going to bring it, but Sandy probably, if she knew, wouldn't have let me anyway. But I don't know about you, but you've been out in the shopping centres and stuff, and you know the songs they're playing. Seems like every second artist has got to put their own twist on Hark the Herald Angels Sing and all this sort of stuff.

It, the beauty, the glory, the majesty of this time, this Advent, has all been covered over with crass commercialism and a world that's missing the absolute point of it all. How about you? How about me? This week, two things happened that hit me hard. One is this week there was a family gathering at my home.

And after that gathering, my youngest son drove. He lives on the North Side of Brisbane, and he went home. It was a bit late. And then the phone rings, and I looked, and it's Andrew, and I thought, Oh no, accident. I can't cope if it's another accident.

But it wasn't an accident, because he came across a woman climbing the power pylons up in the top of Tamborine. She was going to kill herself. Pete stopped, and then he saw her climbing up the pylons. So he got her down. I don't know how he did it. She had her hair all entangled in the barbed wire and all the rest of it, and he got her down.

And he talked to her, and then she took the bolt, and he rang me, and he said, Dad, what do I do? Can't just leave her. She's psycho. I said, Mate, ring 000. Ask for Danny Venter.

So he rang 000, and I got my daughter, and we went there. By then he'd found her in the bush, and we parked on the side of the road up there, and I'm leaning against the bull bar on his car. Oh, the lights are on, and she's, and he's, he's this woman, he's holding her hand. My Andrew is not the sort of man that sort of holds hands easily. He's holding this woman's hand, and he's talking to her, and it went on, and then Wendy, my daughter, spoke to her, and Wendy hugged her for what seemed like an eternity, and the police came, and it was in our face, you know? And I thought about that woman and her children and her husband, the perpetrator of domestic violence.

And Danny will sort of probably understand this in a way, but what do we expect the police to do? They can't fix it. It's complicated. And as I emotionally came down, I thought again, this woman and her husband and her children, they need to know this one, conceived of the virgin, the one who came to offer himself as the full payment for the sin of mankind.

And then I realised that in the sermon that I was going to preach this morning, that I was going to say to you that it's our job to carry that message. Now I've got a scripture passage I'm going to finish on with that. But just before we do that, I just want to slip through a couple of scripture passages just to affirm that these random pregnancies, that they're not random pregnancies. I just want to affirm the divinity of Christ. So can we have the John, John's one first, please? John's gospel we're going to go to.

John chapter one. See, see, this is the Jesus whom we love, and whom we are here worshipping, and this is the Jesus whom we have to carry into the world. Right? In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.

All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And we're not going to read the rest, but that comes into the Baptist ministry. Can we go to verse 14, please? Verse 14.

And the Word became flesh, this is Jesus, and dwelt among us. We have seen His glory, glory as of the only son from the Father, full of grace and truth. And John bore witness about Him and cried out, This was He of whom I said, He who comes after me ranks before me, because He was before me. Oh, isn't that totally brilliant? He was before me.

We just read in Luke that John was older. He was six months older than Jesus. No. Not in God's plan.

John is acknowledging the pre-existence of the Christ. And from His fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. And no one has ever seen God; the only God who was at the Father's side, He has made Him known. This is the Christ. This is the one that we're bringing.

And now I'm thinking a little bit of that woman and her family. And I'm thinking part of my responsibility is to bring this truth to her, to her family. And part of me says, How in the blue blazes am I ever going to do that? I was leaning on that on the bull bar of my son's car. I'm standing there, and I'm saying, God, thank you that Andrew's here. He's doing a heaps better job than I would have.

Heaps better. So when I rang Andrew the next day, How you going, mate? He said, Dad, it has knocked me around something chronic. Part of me said that's good. I said, But mate, you don't know how God's going to use it.

And basically Andrew said, Well, Dad, God's got to do it, because I got nothing. We have the truth of the holy scripture to bring, but we need the spirit of the living God. That same one who overshadowed Mary. We need that same spirit to be at work in the heart and minds and lives of those to whom we bring the message. And sometimes I can feel terribly overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, and then I need to slap myself around a bit and say, Bob, it's not about you.

You bring the message, and see what God chooses to do with it in His time. In His time. So then perhaps we might just quickly go to Ephesians, please. Did we go to Ephesians next on the list? Yeah.

Ephesians one. Blessed. I'm just reading from verse three. Blessed is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ in every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. Do you get this sense? Yeah.

He reigns. God's actually in control of the whole deal, yeah? Just as well, because up to you and me, problems. But God, in His glorious grace and mercy, He comes in His time.

All through the Old Testament, there they are, and all the sacrifices and all the prophecies and all the rest of it. In God's time, He comes, and He comes in His way, and He does, I don't mean it in a bad way, He does His thing, and it isn't random. Can we have the first Peter one as well, please? First Peter chapter one, that's verse 20, that's good.

Thank you for that. Brilliant. I'm just going to read a little bit before there, from verse 18. There's no need to put it up. That's brilliant what you've got.

You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but made manifest in the last times for the sake of you. Are you getting that sense of God unfolding His plan? God unfolding His plan. It is eternal plan.

We didn't read it in the rest of Ephesians chapter one, but He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. So you and I have been given this incredible task, incredible task, but we are part of God's redemption plan. Let's go to the second Corinthians passage. Second Corinthians chapter five. We're going to read from verse 17. Beautiful, verse 17.

If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. And then you think back to what our pastor said last Sunday morning. But now if we go to verse 18, all this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ. God making His appeal through us, and we implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake, He made Him to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. Here's the reason He was born. He was born so that He may die, so that He may offer the perfect, once-for-all sacrifice for sin.

The atoning sacrifice. And in that light, then you and I are called to carry that message. Could I have verse 17 back up on the screen? Thanks. Thank you.

Do you see yourself in this verse? See, I can do the bang on about the historical Jesus and all of that, you know, and I can, that's terrific news. But do you see that you too are not a random pregnancy? Your parents may not have expected you or planned you. We're not worried about that this morning.

You're not, it's not just random that you're here. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. So I'm going to change it from pregnancy to birth. So we'll just advance it nine months. That's cool.

Your birth, your natural birth, was not an accident. God is the one who gave you life in the womb of your mother, but God is the one who, by the power of His spirit, has caused you to be born again. Born from above, so that you may carry the message of the one who has redeemed you to a dark, dying, fallen world. The other thing that hit me like a ton of bricks this week was the release of the Royal Commission findings. I'll be honest, I can't read some of that stuff.

It just breaks my heart. The suffering that's been inflicted. Horrendous. But what's the answer to all of that? You can have a 185, a 189 recommendations, however many there are.

You can have 17 volumes of report. You can have politicians stand up and say yes, we're going to do this and all the rest of it. And maybe they will do some good things, hopefully, for the good of the nation. But you can't legislate sin out of existence. It's like the woman with domestic violence that drove her to the point of not wanting to be here anymore.

You can't legislate that out of existence. We live in a fallen world. We're actually fallen creatures ourselves, but by the grace of God we have been redeemed. Do you see the privilege of grace that you have? Do I see it?

I'm staggered. I don't want to make this about me, but I am staggered at how easy I find it to keep my mouth shut. Shameful. Now I'm Judy Bowne, and I'm saying it publicly here because some of you are going to ask me about it in a few weeks or so. I'm going to try and find that woman.

I know she lives on the mountain. I know where she is in rough terms. He might punch my head in. It's alright.

But I've got to show the love of Christ. And it's not just show the love of Christ. I've got to speak the love of Christ. Because she was saying about my son, she was saying to the policeman, He's a lovely man.

Oh, look. He rang his father and his sister, and they came. They're lovely people. I don't want to be a lovely person. I want to be a Christ light.

I don't think you can be that if you're not a lovely person, but that's beside the point. So this Advent season, we're going to have a great time tonight. Incidentally, Gary, it's not just the music, it's preaching, brother. It's the preaching. Now I know you know that.

But don't we have to go beyond these walls with that message? I'll pick on Rob. I was going to do Steve, but, you know, I've, yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

As head of, yeah. I know. Shake your head, and you think, Here he goes again. And Noah's saying, Go for it, pastor Bob. See, it's hard because Rob has been in his workplace for many, many years, haven't you?

A long time. All the staff know you. They know the Van Dremelin foibles and the strengths, but also the weaknesses, and so. And yet, what's your main job there? I know you've got responsibility to your employer, and maybe you're a partner now, I don't even know, but maybe you do.

Or you have that. But I want to suggest to you that your greatest responsibility is to point to Christ. And it's not just Rob. I just pick on him because I've known him for nearly forty years. Don't you smile, young fella in the back row. I could get you real, real easy from up here.

You might be a visitor here now, but that don't mean you're safe. See, we're not here for our own pleasure. We're not here to have amazing careers. We're not here to build bigger and better and have more stuff. And we're not even here to go on wonderful trips in the bush in your caravan and all the rest of it. That's not what we're here for.

We're here to speak the truth about the Christ. May God use you and use me beyond these walls, in the marketplace, in our homes, that we be willing to say, God, here am I. Use me. Amen. Lord, we thank you that you broke into human history in such a glorious and majestic way with the incarnation of our Son, our Saviour, the God of eternity, who came, was born to die.

We thank you that in Your amazing redemption plan You have called us out of darkness into Your glorious light. We thank you for the working of Your holy spirit in our sinful, stubborn, hard hearts, and that You have caused each believer to be born again, that You've gifted us with Your spirit. You've given us Your word. You've given us the fellowship of Your church. And, oh God, we pray that increasingly we may be strong, vibrant, compassionate witnesses of the Lord Jesus.

Help us in our homes, in our workplaces, in our leisure, in our communities. Help us, oh God, not just to be lovely, caring people, but help us to be speakers of the glorious truth who is Christ Jesus. We need Your help. We need Your spirit to be with us. We need Your spirit to be applying things in the hearts and minds and lives of people.

And oh God, we commit ourselves to that task in Jesus' name. Amen.