If He’s Lord, He must be obeyed. And if He’s Savior, He must be Lord. Jesus didn’t allow anyone to think that somehow they could be saved and do their own thing. But if they were going to be saved, it was going to be by Jesus the Savior, who is at the same time the Lord. And it was impossible to have one part of Him without having the other. By nature we don’t want that kind of Savior, but that’s the kind of Savior we very much need.

You know, it’s an interesting feature of this word, “Messiah” (“Anointed One”), that in the Old Testament period, there were three classes of people who were anointed. The prophets were anointed, the priests were anointed, and the kings were anointed. It’s also an interesting feature that neither one was to cross over into the bounds of the other. But when the Messiah comes, the Anointed One, He is to be a Person who embraces all three of those offices in Himself.

Now Jesus Christ was announced by the angels to the shepherds as the One who solves that sin problem. He solved it by His own death. He came to die for our sin. Our sin means that we, in our basic nature, are at odds with the God of the universe. And because we’re in opposition to the God of the universe, we’re at odds with all of the laws that govern the universe, all the moral laws that should provide for our well-being if we were obeying that God. And our sin has erected a great barrier between ourselves and God.

Now there were several reasons why this message was a message of joy to the shepherds and why, in exactly the same way, it must be a message of joy to us. And the first is that it had to do with the Savior.

It was C. S. Lewis who invented the phrase, “surprised by joy.” It’s the title of his autobiography. But I suppose that if there were ever people who were supremely surprised by joy, it was the shepherds when the angels appeared in the sky to announce that on that evening in Bethlehem, a Savior had been born.

At this point I have spoken of three great miracles of Christmas: that God should become man, that He should do so by means of a virgin birth, and that Mary should have believed the angel’s announcement. But now I want to say that the last of these miracles needs to have its counterpart in us. We too need to believe the good news concerning this child, that He is the Savior sent by the Father to deliver us from sin, and that we need to commit ourselves to Him in wholehearted trust and obedience.

It is hard to think of Christmas without thinking of the two great miracles I have mentioned—the incarnation and the Virgin Birth—and yet the third of these three miracles is the greatest of all, namely, that Mary should believe the angel’s message.