Gary Hamrick - The Road to Christmas (01/22/2026)
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In Isaiah 7:14, the prophet foretells the virgin birth of Immanuel; Pastor Gary explains that the miracle of Christmas is Christ's divine conception by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary—a sinful yet chosen vessel—bypassing the sin nature passed through man, enabling Jesus to be fully God and fully man, the perfect sacrifice to redeem humanity from sin.
Opening Prayer
Let’s pray, and then we’re going to read verse 14.
Lord, we thank you for your love for us—and especially this time of year when we remember the Christmas story and just all the wonderful aspects of your divine plan to come to earth to redeem us from our sins. And we just stand in awe of your love for us—that you would leave your throne to descend to our level and to become like us, to die for us. And so we’re grateful, Lord, and we just so appreciate your love for us and the demonstration of your love supremely on the cross.
And so, Lord, just begin to focus our hearts this Christmas season on the real message and meaning of why we celebrate Christmas. And I’m just so thankful to have the opportunity to open your Word today. Thank you, Lord, for all those who are here and those who are watching online today. We just commit the service to you. In Jesus' name, and everybody said amen.
Scripture Reading: Isaiah 7:14
Isaiah chapter 7 and verse 14—a very familiar verse, I’m sure, to many of you. A verse that is often on our Christmas cards. Isaiah 7:14 says, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”
Preparing for Christmas
So in order to prepare our hearts for Christmas, I’ve decided to put our study through Jeremiah on hold until the first of the new year and look today, next week, and then leading up to the 23rd and 24th—our Christmas Eve services—look just more at the Christmas story so that our hearts might just be more prepared as we worship and as we consider the miracle of the birth of Christ.
And it is just that—it is a miracle. A miracle: something that cannot be explained by human ingenuity or by natural causes, but something rather that is of divine origin, of supernatural cause. And so that’s what the Christmas story is all about.
Sports commentator Al Michaels has immortalized that now-famous question that he asked in the 1980 Olympics: “Do you believe in miracles?"—when the United States hockey team beat the Soviet Union in the semifinals.
And the fact of the matter is that the Christmas story really is something that you must believe in miracles in order to really appreciate the full impact and implication of the birth of Christ. I’m not sure how much God has to do with hockey games, but I am certain that He had everything to do with the birth of Jesus Christ.
Now, to be technical, it wasn’t Jesus’s birth that was a miracle—not any more than we would already ascribe any birth—every birth—as a miracle. Because the birth of Jesus was quite natural. What was supernatural was His conception. That’s the miracle of Christmas—the miracle of His conception. And that’s going to be the focus of our study today.
Misconceptions About Christ's Conception
There’s been a lot of—if I can coin this phrase—there’s been a lot of misconception about His conception over the generations and over the centuries. There have been a lot of falsehoods taught and a lot of falsehoods believed. And that’s to be expected whenever people try to explain something that cannot be explained apart from God.
Take, for example, man’s attempt to explain the origin of life. When you try to explain the origin of life apart from God, you come up with some silly explanations and a lot of misunderstandings.
Case in point: scientists have no explanation for the origin of life. And therefore, when you don’t put God in the equation, they end up coming up with some very silly things that they’ve said in explanation for the origin of life.
I’ve used this before, but Dr. Francis Crick—who is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist—in an attempt to explain the origin of life apart from God, he once said quote, “We should consider the idea that space aliens sent a rocket ship to the earth to seed it with spores to begin life,” end quote.
That’s a Nobel Prize-winning scientist—and that’s the kind of silly things that silly people say, even educated people, when they don’t want to acknowledge God in the equation.
And so it’s historically no different when it comes to the discussion about the conception of Christ. Over the centuries, there have been some silly things said and written in an attempt to explain it apart from God.
And so for those of you who are taking notes, we’re going to talk briefly about the misconceptions about Jesus’s conception—giving you just first a few historical misconceptions about His conception.
And the first one we’ll call the Roman soldier theory—because there actually existed many centuries ago a theory that Jesus was the illegitimate child of a Roman soldier who had a love affair with Mary. That was one misconception.
Another one over the centuries that emerged in the 8th century is a misconception we’ll call the neighbor theory. In the 8th century, there was an anti-Christian cult that put forward the idea that after Mary had married Joseph, she unwittingly conceived a child by a neighbor who came in the dark of the night—and she thought it was Joseph and didn’t recognize, because it was dark, that it was her neighbor. And so her neighbor had sex with her; she conceived a child, gave birth to a son. Joseph realized it wasn’t his son, so after she gave birth, he left her. That was a theory that emerged from the eighth century.
More recently, in the 1960s, similar attacks were made by author Hugh Schonfield—who was supposed to have been a theologian. He wrote a book called The Passover Plot, which postulated that Jesus was the natural son of Joseph and Mary. And Schonfield viewed Jesus as nothing but a master conspirator who thought he could be the Messiah and purposely tried to fulfill Messianic prophecies.
And in his book, Schonfield wrote quote, “There was nothing peculiar about the birth of Jesus. He was not God incarnate, and no virgin mother bore him. The church, in its ancient zeal, fathered a myth and became bound to it as dogma,” end quote.
Of course, all of this is nothing really new—because even in Jesus’s day, His own critics, His own skeptics, His enemies questioned His parentage. In John chapter 6, when Jesus said, “I am the bread of life who comes down from heaven,” His critics would say in John 6:42, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, 'I came down from heaven'?”
And in John chapter 8, when Jesus challenged the Jews who were trying to kill Him that they were not acting like true descendants of Abraham, they said in John 8, verse 41: “Well, at least we have Abraham as our father. We are not illegitimate children"—implying that He was—implying that Jesus was an illegitimate child of some promiscuous relationship between Mary and some unknown man.
And so these are the kinds of things—over the centuries and many others—that have been said as falsehoods about Christ—things believed about His conception.
The True Story: From Eden to the Incarnation
And so what is the story of the conception of Christ? And why is it so important—not only to the Christmas story but to all of Christianity?
Well, to understand it, we have to go all the way back to the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis. Now, I’m not going to ask you to turn there—don’t worry; I’m going to just basically summarize some of the events from the book of Genesis. But in order to really understand the whole conception of Jesus, we have to start from the very beginning.
So in the book of Genesis, God tells us that He planted a garden—a tropical, lush, green paradise called the Garden of Eden—somewhere in the Middle East. The Bible says that where four rivers intersected was the location of the Garden of Eden. And the four rivers are named in the book of Genesis; we only know two of them today—the Tigris and the Euphrates. So somewhere in that region was this beautiful oasis, this perfect paradise.
And into this perfect paradise, God placed man. God created man out of the dust of the earth, the Bible says—which is not incompatible with science, by the way, because science tells us that the human body is actually the same 17 chemical elements as dirt: hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and 14 other trace elements.
So it is true, ladies—the guy you’re married to is a dirtball. The actual word for human in the English language comes from the Latin word “humus,” which means soil or dirt in Latin.
And so God named the first man Adam. Adam in Hebrew means red or ruddy—because of the clay from which he was made. And the word “ground” in Hebrew is “adamah"—so that’s the root word for Adam.
So God names the first man Adam that He has placed in this beautiful, perfect oasis—this garden, the Garden of Eden. And then God takes pity on Adam because He sees that Adam is all alone—that Adam has no one to tell him to pick up his underwear or how to drive. And so God gives him a wife.
Come to think of it, Adam never had to worry about underwear until she came into his life. Well, God created Eve—fashioned Eve out of Adam’s flesh. And she would learn to like football, and he would learn to like Hallmark movies—which might actually have been the reason why he decided to go ahead and eat the fruit.
But life was perfect—Adam and Eve in perfect paradise, themselves unspoiled. They had fellowship and friendship with God. The Bible says that Adam walked with God in the cool of the day. It was unspoiled.
But in the midst of this garden, God had placed a single tree. And He said to them: you shall not eat of that tree. Of all the trees in the garden, they were free to eat—but this one tree was placed there. Why? Because God gave them choice. And God gave a gift to the human race, which is the gift of free will.
And God would not violate their free will—because He had to introduce choice into the relationship. Otherwise, if there were no choice for them to love God, obey God, follow God—then they would simply have a relationship with God out of obligation instead of adoration. And there’s a big difference.
You see, that one singular tree in the garden gave them the opportunity—instead of being forced to obey God—they were free to love God. And that’s the basis for every true relationship. No one wants a relationship of any kind—friendship, marriage—where you’re forced to love; you’re forced to obey. We want to be free to love.
And so the beauty is that God, in introducing choice, gave them the opportunity to be free to love Him. But it’s a double-edged sword—because the same freedom to love Him meant that they had the same freedom to reject Him.
And so they did. They ate of the one tree from which God said: you shall not eat. And He had warned them in Genesis 2, verse 17: “For in the day you eat of it, you shall surely die.” What that literally means in Hebrew is: the day you eat of it, the dying process begins.
And so they would experience death eventually—and every succeeding generation would experience death eventually.
You know, grief is one of the most difficult and one of the most gut-wrenching emotions. And the reason is because we were never originally wired to experience death. God’s original intent was that man should live forever. God’s original design was that man should live with God forever and enjoy Him forever.
But because sin entered the human race, death followed. But it’s the reason why grief is such a difficult emotion. I have people say to me once in a while—in struggling with grief because of the death of a loved one or a friend, a family member—that they feel sometimes ashamed that they’re still grieving after all these years.
And I say to them: you know something—allow yourself plenty of time to grieve, because we were never originally wired to experience that emotion. And that’s all the more reason why we need God in our grief—because we were never intended to have experienced it.
So Adam and Eve sinned against God. When they rebelled against Him, they sinned against Him. And their sin tainted the human race. The whole of the human race became corrupt because of one decision.
And so when Adam sinned, the Bible tells us that death came to all—because in Adam all died. And so therefore we’ve received the sin nature. Every succeeding generation from Adam has received the sin nature of Adam—passed on through the seed of man.
I just tucked that thought away for a moment 'cause I’ll really come back to that—but that’s important to the whole Christmas story.
Adam sins; he corrupts the sin nature of humanity. And that sin nature is handed down from generation to generation—through the seed of a man. So that every succeeding generation—including ourselves—is born in sin, struggles with sin nature, and except for the grace of Jesus, will die in our sins—because death has come to all people, because all have sinned.
And therefore the human race became corrupt. But aren’t you glad that God was not content to allow us to remain in our fallen state—and that God pursued us, and that God determined to redeem us? God determined to purchase us back from sin and death.
Though we had forsaken Him, though we had rejected Him, that we had disobeyed Him and dishonored Him—God in His love for us pursued us to redeem us.
And in His redemptive plan, He determined that if one righteous person would step forward on behalf of the entire wicked human race, He would accept one righteous life in exchange for all the wicked lives of the earth.
What a great deal for all of us who are wicked sinners—that one righteous person could suffer the consequences and pay the penalty for all of our sins. Just one—to coin a phrase that we’re familiar with—if one righteous person would take one for the team, then the whole team could be exonerated.
The problem is: there was no righteous person—not since Adam fell and corrupted the whole sinful race of humanity. There is no righteous person.
And God, knowing this, says in Isaiah 59, verse 16 that God saw that there was no one, and He was appalled that there was no one to intervene. “So his own arm achieved salvation for him, and his own righteousness sustained him.”
In other words—in Isaiah 59:16—God understood that no one was righteous enough to take one for the team. And so God decided Himself to intervene—and that He would come Himself and die for us to purchase us back from sin and death—that we might have relationship with Him again.
Since there was no—and is no—one perfect righteous person, God said: I’ll do it. God said: I’ll do it.
And He would insert Himself in the human narrative. And He would divest Himself of His glory. And He would condescend to our level—and He would become like us.
Because how is it that the God of the universe could identify with us—could be like us—in order to pay the price for us? Answer: the Christmas story.
This is the reason we celebrate the birth of Christ—because the Christmas story is about when God condescended to our level to become like us—to pay the price for us. He would become the perfect substitute and suffer for the sins of all people.
John would write it like this in John’s Gospel, chapter 1, verse 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And then further down—John 1:14—he said, “And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
In other words: God determined to step into the human race so that He could redeem the human race from our sin and from death.
The Annunciation to Mary (Luke 1:31-35)
And so in Luke chapter 1—if you want to turn to your New Testaments—in Luke chapter 1, many of you familiar with this passage of Scripture—I’m going to read—but this is where Gabriel then announces to Mary: how is this going to happen? How is it that God would transcend time and space and come into the human narrative and enter into the human race—so that He might be that perfect sacrifice for all of us?
Again, you have to believe in miracles to understand this. But this is what the angel Gabriel announced to Mary in Luke chapter 1. I’m going to read verses 31 to 35.
The angel says to her: “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.” (Or Yahushua in the Hebrew—Yeshua—meaning the Lord is salvation.) “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
And the angel answered: “The Holy Spirit will come on 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.”
And so here in this passage, the angel Gabriel is announcing to Mary that there’s going to be this miraculous phenomenon that happens—where the Spirit of God is going to come upon you. That, in particular, what he’s saying to us is that the seed of God will be implanted in the womb of this virgin—this young woman, probably no older than fifteen years of age. And that she then will give birth to the Son of God—where God would take the aspect of her DNA in terms of her humanity, and He will wrap it in His divinity. And He becomes fully God and fully man—to enter the human race.
You have to understand: at this particular time, that every young woman hoped to be the vessel to give birth to Messiah. The anticipation of Messiah was something that every young girl was excited about—including the whole nation. But that one might have the privilege of giving birth to Messiah was in the heart of every woman in Israel.
And so God determined to choose this one particular young woman. The angel Gabriel shows up unannounced to Mary, and he says: you’re the one.
The question is: out of all the thousands of women in Israel at this particular time—why this young woman? Why this particular young lady?
Well, the simple answer is God’s providential selection. But so that we might understand this in a more technical sense—clearly the Bible portrays Mary as someone who was devout, someone who was faithful, someone who was pure, someone who was humble, righteous, obedient, etc.
But was she the most of those things? Was she the most devout, the most faithful? Was she the most pure, the most humble, the most obedient young lady on earth at this particular time? Was Mary the most perfect woman on earth that God would choose her?
Now, it almost sounds disrespectful to be asking these questions—but I ask it in the broader sense. When you look at the Bible and all the various people that God chose to use for some incredible, amazing purpose—did He choose—aside from, of course, Christ—did He choose people that are mentioned in the Bible because they were perfect? Answer is no.
You look at people like Abraham and David, Joshua, Moses. You look at people like Paul and Peter. I mean, clearly these are people who are not perfect—and yet God chose to use them. Why? Because God doesn’t choose perfect people—there are none.
If there were a perfect person, then Jesus wouldn’t have had to die for our sins—that person could have interceded instead. But God chose people throughout the course of human history who were not perfect. God chose them because they were a perfect part of His perfect plan—but they were human vessels: frail and faulted in their own way.
And Mary is no different here. She was not a perfect person—but she was God’s perfect choice.
Paul would remind us in 1 Corinthians 1 that God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.
That’s the way He’s operated throughout time and eternity in choosing human vessels. He doesn’t choose anybody who’s perfect—because there is no perfect person. And Mary is no different.
People would have looked at her and said: Mary? Who? You’re the one who God has chosen? There was nothing about her that made her this perfect image of this vessel to be used—other than she was God’s divine selection for this very divine and special purpose.
She was clearly unique; she was special; she was distinct; and she was blessed by the Lord. We should honor her; we should respect her—even admire her. But we must never venerate her; we must never worship her; we must never pray to her or ask her permission to talk to her Son.
Clarifying the Immaculate Conception
Now, I mention these things because—as part of understanding the true Christmas story and the true conception of Jesus—we have to get some clarity on things that have circulated over the centuries.
And so I’m going to tread into an area—with all due respect to my Catholic friends—that makes an important distinction here in terms of history and the Bible. This is something, of course, that our theology differs from the Roman Catholic Church.
The Roman Catholic Church teaches the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. It was a doctrine that was codified by Pope Pius IX in the year 1854.
And I can tell you that as a young Christian growing up—without really clearly understanding what the Immaculate Conception meant—I thought everybody who was a Christian was supposed to believe in the Immaculate Conception—because I thought that the Immaculate Conception referred to this miraculous conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary.
That is not what the Immaculate Conception doctrine is all about. The Immaculate Conception is a teaching of the Roman Catholic Church—and quoting from their doctrine—that by a singular grace and privilege of God, Mary was preserved from the stain or effects of original sin from the first moment of her conception by her parents. And thus she really was perfect—because she had been conceived without original sin.
But that is not what the Bible teaches. And so in order to be accurate to the Christmas story, we have to add to our list of misconceptions about Jesus’s conception: the Immaculate Conception.
Now again—please hear me—when we talk about the Immaculate Conception, we’re talking about the Immaculate Conception of Mary—that she was without original sin herself. Immaculate Conception of Mary: no. Miraculous conception of Jesus: yes. And those are two very different doctrines.
Listen, folks—the Bible teaches that Mary was a sinner like everybody else—because she confessed her need for a Savior. In an often-overlooked passage—out of her own lips—Mary sings a song in Luke chapter 1 that is called today the Magnificat.
And in Luke chapter 1, verses 46 and 47, it says this—and Mary said (this is a song recorded in the Scripture)—and Mary said: “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”
Folks, you don’t refer to God as “my Savior” unless you recognize your personal need for being saved. Mary understood her need for a Savior. She knew she wasn’t perfect. We must not treat her as such today. We must not venerate her, worship her, or pray to her—though we can honor her and respect and admire and appreciate how she was used for a very blessed occasion.
But she’s no different from you and me in the sense that we all need a Savior. She just had this wonderful, awesome, unique privilege of giving birth to that one and only Savior.
That said—I understand why the Roman Catholic Church wants to believe in the sinless nature of Mary—because they, like we, believe in the sinless nature of Christ—that, as Hebrews 4:15 says, He was perfect; He was tempted in every way but was without sin.
So then the question becomes: how can a perfect Savior come from an imperfect mother? Wouldn’t the sin nature in Mary be transferred along to Jesus?
So back to our garden discussion: when Adam sinned against God, sin entered the human race—and sin was passed through the seed of man to every successive generation, including our own.
The miracle of the conception of Jesus is that Jesus was not conceived by the seed of man. Jesus was conceived by the seed of God—and thus bypassing the sin nature that is ordinarily passed through the seed of man.
So that when Jesus was conceived in the womb of Mary, it was by the miraculous divine seed of God—without sin. And thus the humanity of Mary joined the divinity of God—and Jesus is born the God-man who would die for the sins of the world: fully God and fully man—who loves us so much that He entered the human race to pay the price for our sins.
Give God praise. He became the perfect sinless sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.
This is why Paul would write in Galatians 4:4: “But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.”
That little baby who was born 2,000 years ago was God’s grand entrance into our world—when He laid down His glory and stepped away from His throne in heaven and condescended to our level to become like us—in order to pay the price for us, to redeem us from our sins.
Hymn: Thou Didst Leave Thy Throne
This whole theme of God divesting Himself of His glory and laying down His crown in heaven in order to come to earth to be like us and die for us—that whole theme was captured in an old Christmas hymn—not that familiar—called “Thou Didst Leave Thy Throne” written in 1864 by Emily Elliott.
In that song, she wrote in part these words: “Thou didst leave Thy throne and Thy kingly crown when Thou camest to earth for me; but in Bethlehem’s home there was found no room for Thy holy nativity. O come to my heart, Lord Jesus; there is room in my heart for Thee.”
Closing Prayer
Let’s pray together. Father, we thank you for this great and awesome miraculous plan—when you came to earth to take on flesh, to be born of a virgin—that you might grow up to die on a cross. That you would—in the sense of how we know this term today—that you would take one for the team. Since there was no one righteous enough to pay the price for all of us who are wicked, you determined that you would come yourself.
And so you did. And I pray that this Christmas that we would not get lost in all of the senseless, meaningless stuff—but that we would be focused on the fact that you love us so much that 2,000 years ago you left your throne in heaven and you condescended to our level and you wrapped yourself in human flesh and you became like us to die for us—so that in you, by faith in you, we might have sins forgiven; we might be redeemed; we might be able to go to heaven when we die.
You paid the price for a corrupt human race—so that as many as believed you, to them that believed on your name, you gave the right to become children of God—born again by faith.
We’re so grateful, Lord, that you would leave your throne and come to earth to save us from our sins. This Christmas, I pray we would not forget the true meaning. And as we celebrate your birth, may we cherish the thought, Lord, that you would love us so much—you would come to rescue us, to redeem us.
How grateful we are, Lord. We love you in response. Thank you, Jesus, for coming to earth to save us from our sins. We glorify you; we magnify your name. And it’s in Jesus' name we pray these things, and everybody said amen.