12/15/2025
Merry Christmas, Dearest Friends,
We don’t know a whole lot about Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mary was probably a teenage girl; her life was pretty much planned out. She was going to get married. She was going to marry a guy that she probably hadn’t even met yet. His name was Joseph, and they would live wherever her parents told them to live. She would meet him maybe on her wedding day, when they would perhaps be introduced to each other for the first time.
“Mary, this is Joseph. Joseph, this is Mary. We don’t know if you love each other or not; you two can work that out. But you will get married, you’re going to have kids, you’re going to give your parents some grandchildren, and if you live long enough (you might not) you might get to meet your own grandchildren someday.” And then you will die, no one will even know your name, because you grew up in this dusty little place in the middle of nowhere, during a time when no one even really cared what happened in Israel. You will just be another nameless person who came and went and was thrown into the dustbin of history, and then it will be over.
That was Mary. Just another random life, who would get married, and have children. But God, in this period of history, had decided to touch down into the world to remind you, and to remind me, that God is a God who is involved. What may seem random to us is purposeful in the mind of God. That’s why you see purpose in your life.
The angel came to Mary and probably scared her to death. The angel said, “Don’t be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 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 the house of Jacob forever. And his kingdom will never end.”
Who would believe that? Who could believe that?
2,000 years later, when you hear the term “Son of God,” that does not surprise you. At Christmas we are reminded that even when things around you feel irredeemable — an irredeemable death, an irredeemable job loss, an irredeemable situation in your life, there is nothing good that can come from this — at Christmas, we are reminded: God is with us. That is the thumbprint of God.
And that thumbprint of God in you is confirmed at Christmas, as God sent his Son into the world — this seemingly purposeless world — to do an extraordinary, extraordinary thing.
Christmas is the epicenter of God’s activity,
Bruce Jones, Pastor
Imagine Church
