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The Date of the Birth of Jesus

By Jeremy Myers
18 Comments

The Date of the Birth of Jesus

Christmas Date

What was the date of the birth of Jesus? Do you care? I don’t really.ย But I used to. I preached an entire sermon on it once. Here is an excerpt from that sermon:


…Nine months later, John the Baptist in born. This would mean that John the Baptist was born in late March. The date of Johnโ€™s birth is important also, but I will get to that in just a moment. For now, remember that six months into Elizabethโ€™s pregnancy, Mary also was visited by the angel Gabriel and she, as a virgin, miraculously conceived. So this means that John the Baptist was six months older than Jesus. So think about it. If John was born in late March, then six months later, Jesus would have been born of Mary, this makes His birthday sometime in late September.

Also, here is where it gets exciting. Knowing such a fact does not make us better Christians unless we can apply it. Right? So here is where it gets spiritually profitable to know such a fact. You probably know that the Jews had many holidays and feasts throughout the year, just like we do. But as many of you know, these feasts were not only ways to remember what God had done in the past, kind of like our Thanksgiving, but were also prophetic for what God was going to do in the future.

The Jewish feasts both looked backward to what God had done in the past, and looked forward to what he had promised to do in the future. It is very similar to our Lordโ€™s Supper, or Communion. When we observe communion, it both looks back to what Jesus Christ did on the cross for us, and it looks forward to when He will come again.


It is funny where I say, “Knowing such a fact does not make us better Christians unless we can apply it.” Ha!

I am not sure that my “theory” is actually fact, and even if it is, I’m not sure such an idea can actually be applied. Even if it could be applied, I’m not sure that knowing the date of Jesus’ birth will make us “better Christians” even if we do apply it. And even if it could, I don’t think I do that great of a job applying this “fact” in the sermon.

Ah, well… there is nothing like laughing at yourself to brighten the holiday cheer.

I do remember really enjoying preparing and preaching that sermon. I am sure that in another ten years, I will look back and some of what I have written on this blog, and roll my eyes at it as well.

If you want to read the rest of the sermon, it is here: Luke 2:1-3 – Christmas Redemption. If you are looking for other devotional ideas on the theme of Christmas, try some of my Scriptures on Christmas.

God is Uncategorized Bible & Theology Topics: birth of Jesus, Christmas, December 25, Discipleship, Luke 2, Theology of Jesus

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The Troubles of Joseph and Mary

By Jeremy Myers
11 Comments

The Troubles of Joseph and Mary

One of my favorite passages is Isaiah 28:27-28.

โ€ฆcaraway is beaten with a rod, and cummin with a stick. Grain must be ground to make breadโ€ฆโ€

Do you ever feel like the caraway, the cummin, and the grain in this verse?

Do you ever feel like life is beating you with a stick? Like you are being ground to pieces?

Do you ever feel like all the world is against you? Like nothing goes your way? Like even God has turned away from you?

You have financial problems, and health problems, marital problems, family problems, job problems, car problems, and on and on it goes.

Joseph and Mary faced many of these troubles as well, and they had the added pressure of being the parents of the promised Messiah. Imagine that burden!

Joseph and Mary
This scene is from “The Nativity Story” which is one of the best movies about the birth of Jesus I have ever seen.

Yet as they faced their troubles and obeyed God, He sent angels and shepherds and wise men to welcome the birth of their son.

Just as with Mary and Joseph, troubles and trials in life are tools in the hand of God to mold us and shape us and make us into something beyond our imagination. When trials and troubles come into your life, you may feel like you are getting beaten with rods and ground into powder, but as Isaiah 28 says, grain must be ground to make bread.

God is making you into something great. In whatever trials you are facing, ask God these kinds of questions: Say, โ€œFather, what are you trying to teach me in this situation? How can this trial make me more like Jesus Christ? What chaff in my life are you trying to grind out of me? How can this troubling time make me better instead of bitter?โ€

God wants to change your troubles into trumpets if you will only let him perform His work in you.

(This Christmas meditation is drawn from a sermon on Luke 2:1-20 I preached several years ago when I was a pastor. For more Christmas meditations, see Scriptures on Christmas.)

God is Uncategorized Bible & Theology Topics: Bible commentary, Bible Commentary on Luke, Christmas, Discipleship, Joseph, Luke 2, Mary

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What Christmas Means to C. S. Lewis

By Jeremy Myers
18 Comments

What Christmas Means to C. S. Lewis

CS Lewis on ChristmasIn God in the Dock, a collection of Essays by C. S. Lewis, I stumbled upon an called “What Christmas Means to Me” (pp. 304-305).

Below are the opening and closing paragraphs of this :

Three things go by the name of Christmas. One is a religious festival. This is important and obligatory for Christians, but as it can be of no interest to anyone else, I shall naturally say no more about it here.ย The second (it has complex historical connections with the first, but we needn’t go into them) is a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality. If it were my business to have a ‘view’ on this, I should say that I much approve of merry-making. But what I approve of much more is everybody minding his own business. I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people should spend their money in their own leisure among their own friends. It is highly probable that they want my advice on such matters as little as I want theirs. But the third thing called Christmas is unfortunately everyone’s business.

Then, in classic C. S. Lewis style, he writes several paragraphs about the nuisance of shopping and buying presents before concluding with this:

We are told that the whole dreary business must go on because it is good for trade. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country, and indeed of the world, in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things. I don’t know the way out. But can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers?ย If the worst comes to the worst I’d sooner give them money for nothing and write it off as a charity. For nothing? Why, better for nothing than for a nuisance.

To the rest of what C.S. Lewis thinks of Christmas, you will have to get this book:ย God in the Dock.

God is Uncategorized Bible & Theology Topics: Christmas, CS Lewis, Discipleship

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Reveling in Pagan Holidays

By Jeremy Myers
33 Comments

Reveling in Pagan Holidays

We should all revel in Pagan holidays. Why? Because Pagan holidays are so revealing.

Most Christians want to stay as far away from Pagan holidays as they can, thinking that participating in pagan holidays is participation with the world. They believe that instead, we should only participate in Christian holidays like Easter and Christmas.

Ironically, Christmas and Easter are two of the biggest Pagan holidays that exist.

Pagan Holidays

I don’t mean that they have become Pagan, and we must “put Christ back into Christmas” to retake the holiday for Jesus. No, I mean that they were originally Pagan holidays, which became Christian holidays. Yes, in some ways they are becoming pagan again, but this is no reason to be scared of them, but to revel in them all the more.

Why? Here is why:

Pagan Holidays Point to Christ

I believe that Pagan holidays and pagan rituals and pagan beliefs, and all the old stories and tales and myths from pagan religions are actually the cry of the divine image of God in man to return to what was lost.ย Pagan holidays reveal a longing for what was lost. A desire for theย reconnectionย of God with man.

And the only “religion” in the world which does the best job of taking all these longings, dreams, desires, and ideas, and bringing them to fruition and fulfillment, is Christianity. Let me rephrase that. Not Christianity, but Christ.

Nearly all of the old pagan stories hint at the gods returning to earth, becoming human, sharing life on earth with us, and some of them even loving humans so much that they sacrifice themselves for us.

Does any of that sound familiar? Of course. All of these stories sound strikingly similar to what happened within Jesus Christ. This is one reason why critics say that the Gospels are not true. They say that the Gospel stories are just rehashed pagan myths, where some of the details and the names of the characters are changed.

I couldn’t disagree more. There is too much historical evidence for the reliability of the Gospels. So how do we explain the similarities between the Gospel accounts and the pagan myths?

Well, why couldn’t the pagan myths be prophetic? Why couldn’t the pagan myths and traditions point people to Jesus and the Gospel?

I mean, we believe that God can reveal Himself through nature, and through conscience, and through other forms of revelation. Why not also through creative stories that were planted in the minds and hearts of men and women all over the earth? Wouldn’t this be one more way to help prepare people to hear the Gospel? When they heard the true account of how Jesus Christ came to earth, they would experience that “Ah-ha!” moment of hearing a story that fills the missing pieces in the longings and desires of their hearts.

So Why Isn’t Paganism True?

But if what I am suggesting is true, that God has revealed His plan prophetically through the myths and tales of paganism, why can’t we all be pagans, and how do we know that Christianity is not just another pagan myth?

Well, there is a problem with the Pagan myths. Most of the gods and deities do not really love mankind, but toy with humanity for their own amusement. They areย self-serving, devious, game-playing deities, who are benevolent on one day, andย malevolentย the next.

Greek Pantheon

Humans have never liked the idea that a god who loves me one day, may be out to destroy me the next. And why do the gods change? Nobody really knows, but numerous theories and ideas are proposed which sometimes seem to appease the gods and make them love us again. Maybe we have to give him some fruit, or a chicken, or a cow, or in really dire situations, one of our own children.

But it is here that Christianity takes a different route, and comes up with an idea that no man could ever invent. Christianity teaches an idea that could have come only from God, for it is found in no other religion, and even still, is so hard to grasp that most people within Christianity do not even believe it.

In Christianity, and Christianity alone, all these negative elements of pagan mythology are stripped away, and we are told that God loves usย so much, that He does not want us to sacrifice our own children, but instead, He will sacrifice His own Son for us. And this isn’t necessary because He is angry at us, but because we have rebelled against Him. We have done everything wrong, and we have turned away from Him, and we have gone to war with Him, yet rather than make us claw our way back to Him and grovel before Him, begging for his forgiveness, He comes running after us, seeking to restore the friendship with us that He lost when we left.

It would be appallingly shameful, if it weren’t so shockingly loving.

And what does Christianity call this shocking love of God?

Grace.

There is no concept like it in any other religion. It is grace and grace alone that sets Christianity apart from every other system of belief.

And I’m not referring to some weak-kneed grace of contemporary Christianity where we teach that God has done His part, and so we must do ours. No, God has done it all. Nor do I mean some half-hearted concept of grace where we must prove our acceptance of it by showing God that we are worthy of it. No, what part of “God has done it all” do we not understand?

It is grace from first to last.

And this brings us back to Pagan myths and pagan holidays.ย It was grace that was absent from all pagan myths, and therefore, it is grace that fulfills all pagan myths, which is why I revel in them.

Grace to Pagans

People are uncomfortable with the idea of pagan myths prophetically pointing to Jesus Christ. But I’m not sure why.

Can nature point people to Jesus? Of course. Can our conscience? Absolutely? How about art and music? Sure. What about stories? Why not? Especially when they reflect what we have seen in nature and felt in our conscience.

And what else are pagan myths except an attempt to explain in story form what has been observed in nature and felt in our conscience? They are nothing if they are not that.

And so why should we be amazed that Jesus fulfills these stories?

But more than that, and here is the best part, and also the part that explains why I revel in pagan holidays, through the grace of Jesus, if He can redeem me from my slavery to sin, why cannot He also redeem stories? Why cannot He also redeem holidays? Which is harder? To redeem a person, or to redeem a day? To redeem a rebellious sinner, or to redeem an imaginative story?

But so that you may know that the Son of Man has power to redeem both stories and days, just look at yourself. If you have risen from your mat of pagan sin and death, then the core of paganism (you and me) has already been redeemed! If Jesus Christ can redeem us, then certainly He can redeem our past, our present, our future, our mistakes, our holidays, and our stories.

Christmas Tree

So this Christmas season, revel in the exchanging of gifts, the decorated trees, the lights and glitter, the songs and poinsettia. None of this has anything to do with the Jesus of the Gospels. It all has pagan roots. But thank God, I have pagan roots too! And so I revel in the paganess of it all. And just as God has made me into a new creation, so also I take the pagan traditions of Christmas, and rethink, reimagine, rework, and recreate them all to point to the person and work of Jesus Christ. In this way, they are brought out of the dominion of darkness and into the kingdom of light of the Son of God.

P.S. I wrote more about this topic in my short eBook, Christmas Redemption. You can get it on Amazon for only $0.99.

God is Uncategorized Bible & Theology Topics: Christmas, Christmas Redemption, Discipleship, Easter, holidays, pagan, Theology of Salvation

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Biggest Hoping Day of the Year

By Jeremy Myers
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Biggest Hoping Day of the Year

Today is one of the most important days of the year.

No, not because it is one of the biggest shopping days of the year, but because it kicks off one of the most celebrated seasons of the Calendar Year: the Season of Advent.

Advent Season

One of the reasons the Christmas Season is so celebrated is because it focuses on hope. Christmas is a Season of Hope. It looks to the birth of Jesus in the past, and all the hope that was wrapped up in that tiny baby born in a manger 2000 years ago, and generates hope in us today as well, that things can change, that things can get better, that redemption can come, that pain and wars and famine and sickness and trials and hunger can disappear, that tears will be wiped away.

Christmas season pulls all the hopes and dreams of the entire world and wraps them into a celebration of hope.

Christmas is probably the most widely celebrated Christian festival in the world. Incredibly, the birth of a tiny baby two thousand years ago in an obscure village in Palestine still has the power to impact and transform lives. Unfortunately it is also the most commercialized event on our calendars and even for many Christians is fast losing its religious significance. So what are we really expecting this Advent and Christmas season? Are we just waiting for a baby born in a stable or are we expecting a Saviour who will transform the world? This monthโ€™s synchroblog is centered around our expectations for the Advent and Christmas season. What are we expecting? How will it impact our lives and our faith?

I answered this question withย my post here.

God is Uncategorized Bible & Theology Topics: advent, Blogging, Christmas, hope, synchroblog

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