Born of the Virgin Mary...Continued from page 5

III. Question three: So what practical relevance does this have for me today?

Answer: This miracle of the Incarnation, of which the virgin birth is a significant part, has multiple practical implications for you. Let me mention three.

The first: You have a God who empathizes with you.

Some of the people I most admire are my alcoholic friends who are engaged in AA.

The other day I ran into a fellow who found out I was a pastor. He shared how he no longer goes to church. He didn't find spiritual reality in church. Religion wasn't for him. He said he was in a twelve-step program, engaged in AA, and was claiming the help of his "Higher Power" to get him through, one day at a time.

My response was, as it always is, "That's fascinating. Are you aware that every one of those twelve steps came straight out of the Bible? And are you aware that the name of your 'Higher Power' is Jesus Christ?" You should have seen his jaw drop.

I went on to tell him of my personal association with Reverend Sam Shoemaker, the pastor of Bill W. Bill W. had come to him with the steps to help alcoholics, but somehow the steps didn't seem to work. Together they sat down and opened the Bible and came up with these working biblical principles and the notion of a "Higher Power," which made help in addiction available, even to atheists, based on biblical spiritual principles.

What a privilege it is to move beyond just the principles to a personal relationship with the God of all history, whose name is Jesus Christ, and who is present in the power of His Holy Spirit.

That's what happened when God took human form.

Hebrews 4:15-16 declares, "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need."

Friday night at the Couples Café, we had a "any-question-goes" time in which young couples peppered me with their questions. One asked, "Give your definition of God." I cast around for some rubric and came up with Paul Tillich's definition, defining God as "the ground of all being." That's a profound definition, isn't it? It sort of says it all, doesn't it? According to this definition, God is sort of an abstract sense of force, or divine being, that always has been and always will be. That's right. But God wanted to move out of the abstract to the highly personal. He had revealed himself already through the prophets by His Spirit to people throughout human history. In the fullness of time, the Word became flesh. God became Incarnate. Jesus Christ is God.

The other day someone told me that they couldn't relate to me because I was converted at age five. They were surprised to hear that my call to become pastor of the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church in Florida was held up for weeks by some of the members of the Pastor Nominating Committee on the basis that mine was a childhood conversion. Two previous pastors, Lane Adams and Ben Hayden, had been converted in mid-adult life and had very dramatic testimonies of how God had turned their lives around. Finally, in my last prolonged interview, when a couple of them hammered at me with this question again, I broke down in tears and said, "I can't change my story. But let me ask you, what do you want for your own children? To have them live like hell and then get converted later in life? Or to know God's love and grace in the person of Jesus Christ from their early childhood on? They'll have enough ups and downs as it is." When the conversation took that turn, tears came to some eyes. I was excused from the room and then called back with the unanimous call of that committee.