The Mary Miracle Part II - Christmas

You're listening to the road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

And so the power of the Holy Spirit can do a miracle, many miracles in your life this year, no matter what your background or education, no matter what your job is, it, it will let the Holy Spirit will yield to the Holy Spirit daily in our lives.

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We hope you are encouraged by today's message from Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

Well, we're talking about Mary.

Turning your Bibles to Luke chapter 1.

Luke 1 · chapter mention

And last week began this idea of what I'm calling the Mary miracle.

And it's this idea, men and women, that God uses ordinary people in ordinary situations to do extraordinary things.

That he wants to use you in a mighty way.

And that he has a DNA that he placed in you before you were born to be a person that he could mightily use in some way based on your DNA, based on your genetic code.

And then you got born again and you came to know Christ.

And you have a personal faith now in Christ.

And that that supercharged you, you know, that supercharged you because now you have the dunamis power of the Holy Spirit within you.

And here's my premise.

Here's my thesis last week and this week.

Is that what God did biologically and physiologically in Mary by coming to her and birthing Jesus within her, God wants to do in our hearts spiritually and emotionally.

That God has given you an emotional, spiritual womb, as it were, that He wants to speak into, that He wants us to minister a miracle through you.

He wants miracles to flow in and through your life.

And if you're open to it, if you're available, God is going to speak to you coming into this new year in ways that He's never spoken to you before, and He's going to bring a breakthrough.

And Mary hadn't had not a clue what was about to happen to her.

When Gabriel shows up and speaks to her.

So look at Luke chapter 1, and as a quick recap of last week, look at verse 28.

Luke 1 · chapter mention

So Gabriel comes, this beautiful, powerful guardian angel that has to say, fear not every time he shows up, because he's so awesome.

He says to Mary, these words, and these are for you and I today.

The angel said, Rejoice, Mary, highly favored one.

The Lord is with you.

Blessed are you among women.

So first of all, the the word, the Greek we talked about last week for highly favored is where we get the word grace, and it's this idea that you're his favorite.

You are his favorite.

Men and women, you are beloved.

You may not have had a mom and dad that called you beloved.

You may not have had a grandparent that called you beloved.

You may have never had an athletic coach that call you beloved, but I'll tell you what, God calls you beloved.

And you are favored by him.

And then he says, you're not only favored, but the Lord is with you.

The Spirit of God is with you.

His presence is with you.

And that you're blessed by him.

So last week, at the end of the service, we opened up and I said, hey, we've got this pastor over in Kurdistan, Pastor Adil.

We want to raise enough money for him to have a salary for the next two years so he can quit his job and pursue building this church that he's got going there, right?

All the money came in, gang.

Through you guys.

All the money came in.

Now, if you raised your hand and you haven't given, you still need to give, but we did that in what?

One minute?

In one minute, the money was there.

That is a minor miracle.

I mean, that's a work of God.

You realize what you've done for Pastor Adil with his sons?

And the loss of his wife in the last couple years, he now has a salary based on our giving to all things possible that allows him to be full-time now in his ministry.

We did that in like one or two minutes.

That's because we're favored, we're blessed, we have the Holy Spirit in his presence, and we and we act by faith, and we say, yes, I'm gonna trust God with my finances, I'm gonna trust God with my marriage, I'm gonna trust God with my family.

Because I've been graced with the Spirit of God over my life.

And so now turn to verse 34, and in verse 34, Mary begins to question what the angel says to her.

Mary said to the angel, How can this be?

Since I do not know a man.

Men and women, the miracle-working power of God is not rational.

It does not make sense most of the time.

And that's where we stop.

That's where Mary could have put a pause button, end of discussion, not be used of God, and God would have to find somebody else.

Because he will.

God is going, he's sovereign and he's gonna accomplish his will.

He's just looking for people who are available for him.

And if you're not available, it's fine.

I mean, it's sad for you, but it's not gonna slow down the advance of the kingdom of God.

God will find somebody else.

I want to be in his I want to be on his team.

When I was 18, I changed jerseys.

Okay, I had a jersey, and my jersey had Holt on the back, and that's all my life was about was Holt.

And then I got saved, and I put on a jersey, and that jersey now for like 30 some odd years has been Jesus.

And I want to be about his kingdom, and it's the most exciting adventure you can be in.

And so Mary's going, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna compromise.

I haven't been with a man.

And so here, as we come into the new year, I'll bet God's putting something on each of your hearts that's unique and special, something you want changed in the new year.

That God wants to bring a breakthrough.

And it doesn't make sense.

Or it's gonna cost you something.

Or it seems too difficult, right?

I mean, having babies is not easy.

All the women in the room go like this, you know, that have had a baby, you know what I'm talking about, right?

You get stretched, and you start eating weird food.

I was talking to someone recently who I was asking what kind of fetishes did you have when you were pregnant, and they said, Man, at one time, I can't remember exactly what she said, I think it was like peanut butter and jelly.

I had peanut butter and jelly on bread.

On bread.

So she had one of the kids put peanut butter and jelly on bread, and then the kid cut the bread into a triangle, and she couldn't stand it.

It had to be a square.

Now that's weird, man.

That's really weird.

And so God wants to stretch you in the new year.

He wants to stretch you, he wants stretch marks in your faith.

He's gonna give you new desires.

God gives us the desires of our heart, but not our fleshly desires, our spiritual desires.

And until we're worshiping and until we're walking that intimate walk with him and spending time in his word, you can't even trust your desires.

But when you start to, when you start to download God's desires through God's word, then you can start trusting your desires, and when you do, he's gonna stretch you.

He's gonna give you new appetites.

I mean, I have some I have some stuff that I eat.

It's not good for me.

Peppermint mocha.

Very large.

At Starbucks.

This time of year, I'm on it.

I am on it.

It's bad.

I mean, you know, you see the calories they have up there?

It's like a million.

And and I've been doing pretty good all year.

I can just ruin it over the next few weeks.

And I and I have sort of ruined it a little bit.

But if I let those kind of desires carry me through, then I'm gonna balloon up.

But if I begin to let God's desires for health and strength and energy and wisdom, and hopefully not dying, you know, before I'm 70, then I have to cultivate, don't I?

I have to cultivate new desires.

So here's Mary.

She's saying, This doesn't make sense.

This is irrational.

I can't do this.

That's probably what she's thinking.

I can't do this.

So here's what the angel said.

This is what the Lord says to us today.

Look at verse 35.

And the angel answered and said to her, The Holy Spirit will come upon you.

And the power, the dunamis of the highest will overshadow you.

Therefore, also that holy one who is to be born will be called the Son of God.

Here's our first lesson about the miraculous and the merry miracle, and that is the Holy Spirit wants to do it.

The Holy Spirit will do it if you'll be available to the Holy Spirit to let him do it through you.

What God wants to do to you is what God wants to do in you so that he can work his miracle through you, so that miracle coming through you can bless all those around you.

Because it's not about you, it's about him.

And it's about the power of the Holy Spirit.

We talked about that in the baptism class today, that when you get saved, when you put your faith in Christ, you get all of the Holy Spirit.

You don't get a foot, you don't get a hand, you get all of Jesus.

You get all of the Holy Spirit living within you.

Now there's more to it than that, because the power of the Holy Spirit being active in our life is through the filling of the Holy Spirit.

And the filling of the Holy Spirit is really about who's on the throne of your life today.

I got filled with the Holy Spirit, and I spoke in tongues, and I fell on the floor, and it was a powerful experience 10 years ago, but I've been through 14 marriages and uh I bezled some money and spent some time in.

I mean, that's not the spirit-filled life.

The spirit-filled life is not a title, it's a function.

It's you and I deciding each day I'm going to be filled with the Holy Spirit today.

So sometimes when people come to our church, they say, Are you a spirit-filled church?

I said, Which day are you talking about?

What?

Well, we just came out of staff meeting.

It wasn't very spirit-filled, so I guess we're not a spirit-filled church today.

But we're pretty good on Monday.

So you understand what I'm saying?

The spirit-filled life is a function of who's on the throne and you relinquishing your will to his will in your heart.

And so the power of the Holy Spirit can do a miracle, many miracles in your life this year, no matter what your background, no matter what education, no matter what your job is, if if we'll let the Holy Spirit, if we'll yield to the Holy Spirit daily in our lives.

So, what do we do?

We we quench the Holy Spirit all the time, don't we?

We quench the Holy Spirit through talking about people, gossip, looking at stuff maybe we shouldn't be looking at.

Um stabbing people in the back in secret by saying things.

Say stuff about people, you know, say mean things about people.

You feel like nobody knows, but there's this big, there's this big God who's everywhere and he hears.

And what happens is, listen up, church, what happens is we quench the Spirit of God in our life, and then we can't understand why three days later this thing we've been praying about is not happening.

Well, it's because you're quenching the Holy Spirit back here in your private life.

So if you're gonna quench the Holy Spirit in your private life, you're not gonna see miracles in your public life.

And so I challenge us that it was in private that the Holy Spirit, I mean, nobody knows.

There's been all kinds of discussions with theologues and historians through the years, what happened to Mary?

How did the Holy Spirit come upon you?

But as far as we know, there's no documented evidence of anything suddenly happening to her in public.

Somehow, Spirit of God conceived it in secret.

Just like a child is conceived in secret.

God does his miracles in secret.

And so that power of the Holy Spirit, I challenge us today, is that function of being filled with the Holy Spirit in secret.

That's true holiness.

Starts work in our life because the public becomes simply a result of our private life.

Verse 36.

Now indeed, I love this part.

Now indeed, Elizabeth, your relative, so Mary doesn't know anything about chapter one, the first part of this chapter.

Okay, obviously.

She doesn't even know that one of her relatives, Elizabeth, is actually pregnant.

Now indeed, Elizabeth, your relative, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is now the sixth month for her, who was called barren.

We know historically that Elizabeth and Zechariah were past childbearing age, so they're probably 60 years or older.

She's become pregnant.

This is the first time that anybody maybe in the family knows.

I'm not even sure Zechariah starts until he starts seeing signs because we look back at chapter 1, because he had tons of doubts about this.

But this has been done before.

And this is the second thing we need to remember about a miracle of God.

Oftentimes we need somebody else's testimony to give us faith.

Remember three weeks ago?

Three weeks ago, all it was was a testimony and worship service.

And you guys went nuts.

I mean, we were clapping and whooping it up through the whole service because those were some really super cool testimonies.

Some have been physically healed, some of you have been emotionally healed.

Some of us have seen things happen financially that we couldn't believe happened, and we testified.

Didn't that help your faith?

Didn't that increase your faith?

You see, faith comes from the body of Christ.

That's why you're part part of the reason why we're here on Sunday is because we need the faith of others that have gone a little bit ahead of us.

That have seen something happen like what we want to see happen.

And if God's putting something in your heart that he wants to bring a breakthrough in the new year, make yourself available to others that have already had that breakthrough.

Because that'll give you faith that he can do that breakthrough in your life when you feel like he can.

Well, you just look at me.

There's no way that can happen in my life.

There's no way I could start a company.

There's no way I could start that ministry.

There's no way I could start doing this.

We'll look around and say, God, would you put in my life some people that have already done it before?

Would you put some people in my life that already went ahead of me and they were anointed by you and they saw a breakthrough?

That's powerful, folks.

When I was thinking of church planning, I was in, we were in Okinawa, Japan.

We love being on staff with Campus Crusade in Okinawa, Japan.

We've been there for eight years.

It's been a great time.

The ministry's booming, tons of cool stuff happening.

And Liz has a dream.

And in the dream, she looks out this big window and she sees these snow-capped mountains, and the Lord says, That's where I'm sending you, and she wakes up.

And she says, Oh, oh, I left out one key part.

Between the window and the mountains is a rodeo.

She wakes up and says, Hey, God showed me where we're supposed to go next.

To explain it to her.

That doesn't mean anything.

That's a dumb dream.

And so, so then six weeks later, or eight weeks later, something like that, I get a call from a guy named Dale Landon, who's a coach for the Athletes in Action women's gymnastics team that I had competed against.

He was at Long Beach State when I was at the University of Georgia, to say he was bringing a women's gymnastics team to Korea, China, and he wanted to do R in Okinawa.

And he said, Hey man, I heard you're there.

Can you set up something where we can rest?

I said, Yes.

They came in.

All the girls go out to the beach one day.

Dale and I are hanging out.

I said, so Dale, tell me about, I'm just, I hadn't seen him in five or six years.

I said, so tell me about Colorado Springs.

He says, Well, hmm, okay, Colorado Springs.

He's sat there and well, if you just think of it this way, if you had a big window and you were looking out a window west, you know, almost any any place in the city, about 80% of the year you're gonna see snow capped mountains from Pike's Peak.

And he sits there and he goes, Oh, and one of the oh no, and the Rodeo Hall of Fame is also in Colorado Springs.

That's weird, man, because he's a gymnast.

He didn't even say anything about the Olympic Training Center, he just mentions the rodeo.

So that guy is thinking.

And then what happened is that we we uh anyway, that starts the thing, and then there were 25 other confirmations over the next three years, and we came here and planted a church.

Now, don't forget this.

That was altogether three and a half years from when we first got the dream to the confirmation to 25 other confirmations before it came to pass.

So don't forget that the miracles of God take time.

They take time.

And so that testimony in my life was that I started hanging out with, reading books about, and studying church planting.

So I had the testimony of these men and women of God across the world that had built great churches.

And so I began to get faith because I've never done anything like that before, had no history of anything like that before, but I had the testimony of these other folks in my life that began to give me faith over time.

So we need the testimony of someone else.

Verse 37, you ought to highlight it.

If you're on your phone, you ought to underline it, if you're in your paper Bible, for with God nothing will be impossible.

With God, nothing will be impossible.

God said it, I believe it.

Let's live it.

We need, thirdly, we need a faith in the impossible working God.

How big is your God?

Is your God just a religious God?

Is your God just, you know, something you go and you just kind of see a big cross, you know, or a little cross, you know, in your church?

When you turn around, there's a big cross.

Or is it a personal faith in a living God that can do the impossible?

I challenge us that we ask God, this coming year, God, I don't have it.

I'm not there.

I'm a more of a possibility kind of guy, but this idea of the supernatural, this idea of the extraordinary, this idea of the impossible, I don't have, would you, by your Holy Spirit, give me that kind of faith?

And He will.

You think God is not gonna be excited about anybody on the face of the earth who says, Lord, I want to trust you more?

He will answer that prayer.

And you cry out to him for that prayer, and you start watching out because you're gonna get all messed up.

You're gonna get really messed up.

If you want to get messed up, say, I want to get messed up this year, just say that.

I want to get messed up this year.

Well, you start believing a God of the impossible, you're gonna get messed up.

Because what's gonna happen is you're gonna look at this thing and you're gonna start seeing things that are supra rational.

You're gonna start looking at things that are supernatural.

And you're going to start because here's what's going to happen.

God's going to give you faith to see something that's impossible in the natural, and you're going to say, I'm trusting God.

I'm going to trust His word this year.

And it's going to mess you up, and you're going to be so excited and pumped up.

You're going to actually come into church, you're going to be in the front row.

Some of you folks sitting in the back, you're going to be on the front row.

It's going to mess you up.

You and I are going to be looking at each other now.

Because you're fired up, you're excited to hear from God in a whole new way.

So here's what Mary says.

I love this.

This is what Mary says.

We'll conclude with this.

She says, number one, verse 38, she says, Behold the maidservant of the Lord.

She says, Behold the maidservant of the Lord.

You know what maidservant means?

It means a female slave.

She said, She's saying, Lord, I'll do whatever you want me to do.

I'm available to you.

I'd say, I'd say here fifthly, men and women, I would say this.

Here's what I'd say.

Look, you gotta be surrendered to the will of God.

Are you willing to be a maidservant?

Are you willing to be a manservant?

Are you willing to be a slave?

Say, God, I just want your will.

I just want your will.

I want the miraculous to flow through me.

God, I am available to you.

I'm available to you.

What do you want to do?

I remember a number of years ago, our son Isaac, you guys know he played college baseball.

Some of you may not know that, but he played college baseball.

But he was he was going and in his ninth grade year, he was the MVP for his Vars City baseball team.

So he's a good ball player as a freshman.

But between his sophomore and I mean his freshman and sophomore years, he had a torn labrum in his throwing arm.

So we went to the best orthopedic surgeon in the city, works with the Olympic Training Center and the Olympic team.

When you're walking down this hallway in his um in his office, it's just one Olympian after another, some of which you know, you know, and you're like, whoa.

So he takes the X-ray, does the MRI, all the stuff that they do on that labor.

He says, Yep, torn labrum showed me the pictures.

When do you want to schedule surgery?

And I said, Well, doctor, what does that mean?

Torn labrum.

He says he'll lose 10 to 15 miles an hour off his fastball.

That's what it means.

But he'll have a healed labrum.

So it didn't really sit that well with me, and my response to him didn't sit well with him.

I said, I need to pray about it.

He goes, What?

You've got to have surgery.

I said, I know, I hear what you're saying, but um, I'm gonna pray about it.

That's a pretty big deal to get surgery.

You're telling me this stuff?

He said, Yeah.

So it just so happened that the next few days, I'm gonna be in Estes Park at a conference, and it's at a monastery, Catholic monastery up there.

Beautiful place.

And I go into this chapel, and it's this cute chapel.

John Paul II's been there.

I mean, it's it's uh it's just gorgeous in Estes Park, and so I kneeled down at this little pew, and you know, it's a Catholic thing, so you got the kneeler.

So you can stay there a long time when you have a kneeler.

So I so I pull the kneeler out, I kneel down, I'm looking up, and I mean to tell you, I've been there five minutes at the most.

The Holy Spirit says, I'm gonna heal Isaac's shoulder.

Now it wasn't an audible voice, don't I'm not getting too spooky on you, but it was like in my spirit, he conceived something.

He conceived in my womb, I'm gonna heal that shoulder.

And I was so pumped up, I jumped up, got on my phone, called Isaac at school, and said, You're not gonna have surgery for your labrum.

And he says, What?

And I said, God's gonna heal it.

He goes, Cool.

Don't you love kids?

And then I hang up and I go, That was that was the dumbest thing I've ever done.

What if he doesn't get healed?

I mean, this is crazy.

Got healed.

No surgery.

Played baseball all the way through college.

Now you can call it luck, you can call it the orthopedic surgeon read it wrong.

I can guarantee you we could find those x-rays and find whatever it is, little pictures that I looked at, and it's a torn labrum.

And did he ever go that ever go back and get it rechecked?

No.

But did we ever have a problem with the labrum again?

No.

Surrender to God's will, church, and you'll see miracles like that happen in your life.

I promise you.

And then lastly, Mary says this.

She says, be it done according to your word.

Now you can't say, be it done according to your word if you're not in the word.

You can't say, be it done according to your word if you never spend time in God's word.

And I counsel some of us from time to time, and we come and we talk, don't we?

Sometimes and I say, well, how often are you in the word?

Well, you know, I'm in the word on Sundays.

Okay, then you got Sunday miracles.

What does that mean?

That means that that's like one-seventh of the miracles you could get.

Why don't you try Monday, Wednesday, Friday?

Oh, I can do that.

We've got this little thing called P B and J, this little bookmark.

Just follow that.

Even if you just do it three days a week, just start there.

Start somewhere, church.

And when you start reading God's word, he's gonna give you promises that are for you.

They're not for me, they're for you.

It doesn't matter what I think about your promises, because it's God's promises to you.

He wants to speak to you so that he can conceive a miracle in you, that he can work the miracle out through you, so that he can bless those around you.

But you gotta be in the word.

So look, go to the right in your Bible or scroll down.

2 Peter chapter 1.

2 Peter 1 · chapter mention

So just keep turning to the right.

If you get to Revelation, you've gone too far.

Turn back.

But go to 2 Peter chapter 1 and look what Peter says to us.

2 Peter 1 · chapter mention

This is the guy who denied Christ.

This is the guy that walks on water and then starts drowning.

This is a guy like us, and here's what he says in verse 2 of chapter 1.

Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, as his divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises.

That's his word, that through these you may be partakers of the divine supernatural nature of God, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

Here's what he's saying: he's saying that God wants to provide us, men and women, with the promises of God, such that you, by believing and trusting in the promises of God for your life, you become a partaker of his divine nature.

You become more Christ-like, you become more like Christ, is what he's saying, by believing God.

So here's what's exciting: it takes nine months for a baby to be born.

Nine months for that body to change.

It takes time.

But in that nine months, I guarantee you, any mom who really cares about her kid is watching what she eats, becomes concerned about the desires of her heart, that anything that might hurt or help that baby, she's weird.

She's strange.

Women get strange when they get pregnant.

I know.

We did this a bunch of times in my family.

And and they and they just everything revolves around that growing tummy.

How are you feeling today?

How's the morning sickness thing?

How's the Braxton Hicks?

I mean, we go on ah because that's the way it's supposed to be.

Because the main caregiver of that child is that mother.

And you're the caregiver or miracle of God that He wants to do in your life.

And God's giving you something, He's planting something in you.

I want to challenge you as we go into the new year that you start thinking about this.

You start asking God, God, what do you want to birth in my life in the new year?

What are the three things?

What are the two things?

And maybe it's just one thing, but what is it you want to birth and conceive in me that's a miracle of the Lord?

And then start reading his word, spend time in his word each day, and he's going to speak to you, men and women, in powerful and supernatural ways.

When we when I resigned from Mountain Springs Church and we began to fast and pray before that and then into that, God spoke seven times to Liz and I.

The road less traveled.

The road less traveled.

Church, God's got a road less traveled for each of you in here.

It is a road for you, for nobody else.

And I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but I'll tell you what, it can be fun.

And it can be joyful if we do it together.

Don't do it alone.

Do it with others.

If you read the rest of the chapter, what does Mary do?

She runs to Elizabeth, man.

And she goes and spends time with Elizabeth at her house because she needed the church.

She needed people.

And when God starts to speak to you, run to the church.

Run to people.

You need people.

You need the body of Christ.

That's why we were created.

That's why we're here.

We need each other.

Don't let yourself get isolated this coming year.

Some of us have lived in Christian isolation, and God wants to bring you into the fold with the family of God.

You've been listening to The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

We hope you have been blessed by today's message.

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