Staying Pure in a World of Lowered Expectations

Part 1

My message today is about the virgin conception of Jesus. The topic is essential to the Christian faith. Every statement of faith for the Christian denominations mentions the virgin birth prominently. Without it, Jesus was just a man. The virgin conception of Christ and His death on the cross and resurrection are both equally essential to the Christian faith. We tend in the protestant church to give more emphasis on the Easter message, but the two high holidays of Christmas and Easter are bookends to the gospel message that both illustrate that Jesus Christ was both man and God.

For today’s message we will look at the Christmas story from the perspective of both Mary and Joseph. Our text comes from both Luke and Matthew’s gospels. Let’s start in Luke.

²⁶In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a village in Galilee, ²⁷to a virgin named Mary. She was engaged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of King David. ²⁸Gabriel appeared to her and said, "Greetings, favored woman! The Lord is with you! Blessed are you among women."

²⁹Confused and disturbed, Mary tried to think what the angel could mean.

³⁰"Don't be frightened, Mary," the angel told her, "for God has decided to bless you! ³¹You will become pregnant and have a son, and you are to name him Jesus. ³²He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. ³³And he will reign over Israel forever; his Kingdom will never end!"

³⁴Mary asked the angel, "But how can I have a baby? I am a virgin."

³⁵The angel replied, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the baby born to you will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God. ³⁶What's more, your relative Elizabeth has become pregnant in her old age! People used to say she was barren, but she's already in her sixth month. ³⁷For nothing is impossible with God."

³⁸Mary responded, "I am the Lord's servant, and I am willing to accept whatever he wants. May everything you have said come true." And then the angel left.

Now as I read this passage, I wondered, “How would Mel Gibson put it on film?” The movie, The Passion of the Christ, was so successful, that you’d wonder what he’d do for a follow-up. Maybe not a sequel, but a prequel, covering the birth of Christ.

So let’s set the scene this way:

It’s about 4:00 in the afternoon. Mary is at home with her mother, getting ready to prepare the evening meal. Her mother sends her out for firewood. Mary opens the door of the house and practically bumps into a really big guy. He’s a soldier, but not in Roman fatigues. He stands over seven feet high, all dressed in white. In fact he shines like the sun, even in the afternoon light. At his side is the latest in assault weapons. In Mary’s day it was a two-edged sword, enabling the soldier to strike foes with both the foreswing and the backswing. Today, it might be an M-1 automatic rifle.

Mary’s eyes meet the guy’s chest, a chest that’s somewhere between Pavarati’s and a football player’s. As she takes a step back to take in the whole scene, he greets her, “Hail Mary, favored one! The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.”

“Hail Mary?” she wonders. What kind of greeting is that? Hail Caesar! Hail Herrod! A soldier might greet his Emperor that way, or maybe his governor, but not his captain, much less some little teenage Jewish girl.

She was puzzled. She was scared. The Greek word is diatarasso, meaning agitated, troubled, and disturbed all over. The word is used in Acts 17:13 to describe stirring up a crowd to create a riot.

There was a riot starting in Mary’s soul and she was doing her best to contain it.

“Do not be afraid,” the angel said. Do you ever notice how often this is the second thing they say? The appearance an angel is a scary thing indeed.

To further calm Mary’s agitation, the angel tells her, “for God has decided to bless you!”

“Good,” Mary thinks, “at least that assault weapon isn’t intended for me.”

Now the angel gets down to business, ³¹You will become pregnant and have a son, and you are to name him Jesus. ³²He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. ³³And he will reign over Israel* forever; his Kingdom will never end!"

Now here’s a new puzzlement. This soldier is telling her that she’s going to have a baby. She is going to name him Joshua. Jesus is the Greek equivalent. But let’s not get caught up on the name, she’s going to have a baby. Focus! Baby. He says you are going to have a baby. Uhh, isn’t there usually a guy involved?

Not wanting to make a mistake in response to this announcement, she asks the question, “How can I have a baby? I am a virgin."

The soldier answers her. She doesn’t really understand the answer, except to know that no specific action on her part is required. Somehow, it’s just going to happen.

After a word about her older relative, Elizabeth, the soldier is gone.

Mary ponders these things as she brings in the firewood, eats her dinner, and prepares for bed.

After some mystical experience that night, Mary heads out to visit her relative Elizabeth. I’ll talk more about that visit next week. But when Joseph comes by to see his fiancé, he’s told that she’s gone and won’t be back for a while.

Three months later, Mary comes back to Nazareth. Joseph is eager to see her.

But Mary has changed. She tells him some fantastical tale, and she tells him that she’s pregnant.

“Who is he? Who’s the guy? I’ll show him the business end of a ten-pound hammer! Did he hurt you?”

She insists that there is no guy. Why is she protecting him? Does she love someone else?

No, she says, there is no other guy. God made her pregnant. Either she’s a liar or a lunatic, he’s thinking.

Faith in God has that kind of effect on people. They look at your beliefs, your actions, and they think either you’re lying or you’re crazy. Only after they eliminate those possibilities will they consider that your God might be real. That is why your Christian life and witness must be characterized by honesty and sanity.

But Joseph isn’t convinced. Mary has had an affair even before their wedding day. And by her description, she’s either lying about it or she’s really lost her marbles. He contemplates how to cancel the wedding with a minimum of scandal for Mary.

He goes to bed thinking about what he’s going to tell her parents. He drifts off to sleep. Then at about 4 in the morning there’s a flash in his bedroom, an exceedingly bright light. He tries to shake off the purple afterimage in his eyes as he squints into the brightness. Slowly, his eyes begin to adjust to the light. He becomes aware of a large presence at the foot of his bed. It’s a soldier, dressed in white. His head practically hits the ceiling. In one arm is a terrifying weapon. The muscles ripple. It’s like Stone Cold Steve Austin just popped into his bedroom, only bigger than life.

Could Mary have been right? Or is this just a nightmare.

Joseph sits up in the bed and the soldier addresses him. “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to go ahead with your marriage to Mary. For the child within her has been conceived by the Holy Spirit.”

Notably, the angel doesn’t say, “Do not be afraid of me.” Instead, he says, do not be afraid to follow through with the marriage to Mary. Perhaps that means he should be afraid if he doesn’t marry the girl. That weapon at his side certainly is reinforcing that opinion.

The angel continues with the same instructions that he gave to Mary, “²¹And she will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins."

Then the angel popped out just as suddenly as he popped in. Joseph rises and moves toward the door. It is still barred. He lifts the bar and opens the door, looking off in the distance. All he sees is dawn’s early light. A look down at his own arm as he wonders if what he thinks he saw just now was real. His skin carries a light sunburn.

He knows he won’t be able to get back to sleep after this, so he gets dressed and prepares for the day. Today he will be visiting Mary’s parents, but instead of trying to cancel the wedding, he will be asking about making the date a little sooner.

Now, I’ve taken a few liberties in this storytelling that go beyond the brief text itself to give you a little more sense of being there. It’s the type of thing that a playwright or film director would have to add to the story to flesh it out and convey the emotions involved.

We are now going to see how Joseph and Mary were able to keep themselves pure for the next six months, and how we can use these methods today.

Joseph and Mary were maintaining their virginity in an environment of lowered expectations. Mary was already pregnant when they got married, so for many in the community, the assumption was that she wasn’t able to wait and had already given in to temptation. Joseph had gone ahead and taken her as his wife, so the assumption was that he was equally responsible.

This is a good time to discuss a few definitions of fornication. The Greek word, porneia, is used to mean any type of sexual act outside of a male and female marriage relationship. It includes sex before marriage, prostitution, and adultery. When combined with pictures, it becomes pornography.

The legal definition of fornication in the State of Illinois is:

(720 Illinois Criminal Statutes 5/11-8) (from Ch. 38, par. 11-8)
Sec. 11-8. Fornication.) (a) Any person who has sexual intercourse with another not his spouse commits fornication if the behavior is open and notorious.

Although rarely prosecuted, it is a crime in the state of Illinois.

Because our society has become so accepting of this behavior, it’s difficult for Christians to hold to the standard set by God. My messages today and next week are not intended to make you feel guilty, but to give you some tools to strengthen you. Mary and Joseph found that strength. Matthew 1:24 and 25 say, ²⁴When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord commanded. He brought Mary home to be his wife, ²⁵but she remained a virgin until her son was born. And Joseph named him Jesus.”

The first point I’m going to cover, and probably all I’ll get to today, is PRAY.

The scriptures don’t tell us if Mary prayed to God after she told Joseph about her pregnancy and it looked like the engagement was about to break up. The scriptures don’t tell us if her relative Elizabeth was praying for them, or if Zacharias, her husband the priest, was praying for them. But, I’d suggest that if you spent three months as a pregnant and unwed teen in the home of a preacher, he’s going to pray for you, whether you want those prayers or not. We never hear about Mary’s parents, but having raised a godly girl, it’s likely that they had invested a good deal of prayer in her life as well.

Show me a teen that has kept his or her virginity through high school, and I can find you someone who has been praying for that teen, probably a mother, but maybe a father, grandmother or even all of them.

I know that my mother prayed for me. And even before she put her faith in Jesus as her Savior, God heard the prayers of a mother for her son.

So if you are a parent, or a grandparent, pray for your kids. If you are a teen or preteen, pray for yourself. Pray for whomever might be your future spouse.

Prayer works. And when we pray that God would keep young people from sin, we know that we are praying in God’s will. The Lord himself taught us to pray that we would not be led into temptation. Praying that God would keep someone from sin is always in his will.

Experiment with your friends. I remember once down at college praying for Bruce, a guy on the dorm floor. Bruce wasn’t a Christian, but my roommate and I were trying to share Christ with him. One weekend, his high school girlfriend was coming to campus. We saw him making the preparations for a big date, cleaning the dorm room, doing his laundry early, washing his car. My roommate and I had one simple prayer for Bruce and his girlfriend that Saturday night, that God would keep them from sin.

I saw Bruce early Sunday afternoon after I had come back from church. “So, Bruce,” I couldn’t resist asking, “how’d it go last night?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That bad, eh?”

“I just don’t want to talk about it.”

I think I found out later that dinner had given his girlfriend a little bit of a stomachache.

Prayer works.

But in prayer, God still leaves us free will. One of the things that we do when we pray for ourselves, is to yield a portion of our will. We can take back that free will anytime we want, but for a time, at least, we yield it to Him.

We don’t know if Mary, Elizabeth, Zacharias or someone else prayed for the visit of the angel to Joseph. God may have done it anyways, but let me tell you of an experience in my own life.

It was just a few months after I had accepted Jesus as my Savior and Lord. A girlfriend I had from before my conversion was interested in restarting the relationship. I didn’t know what to do, but I agreed to meet her.

You know, times like that have a tendency to muddle clear thinking and take our focus off of God. So I remember my prayer as I was on my way to meet her. It went something like this:

“Lord, I’m on my way to meet her, and I want to do your will. But once I get with her, I’m likely to be distracted, so make it clear to me in words I cannot ignore, what I’m supposed to do.” I still wasn’t sure of myself, so I prayed that prayer again, “Make it clear to me in words I cannot ignore, what I’m supposed to do.” I prayed that prayer three times.

Let me tell you, God answered those prayers. My maybe current, maybe ex-girlfriend suggested that we go somewhere and “park”. No sooner had the car rolled to a stop than we were approached by not one, not two, but three police officers. They asked for my license, asked what we were there for, and then told us we were not supposed to be there. I was a bit scared and I obeyed. Only after the “date” was over and I was on my home alone, did I realize that God had answered my prayers, precisely. And as I had prayed three times, God had answered three times, and in words I could not ignore.

The angel showed up suddenly in Mary’s life in the daytime. The angel had popped in on Joseph suddenly in the middle of the night. They never knew when the angel might pop in again, but when the angel appeared to Joseph, he knew exactly what Joseph had been thinking.

In the days before birth control, the one time that you can be sure that a physical union won’t lead to pregnancy is when the woman is already pregnant. Joseph could have demanded his right as Mary’s husband at any time and no one in the community would have known. In fact, no one would have cared. But God would have known. The visits of the angel made that clear. And they certainly didn’t want him to come back angry.

God preserved me as a virgin until my wedding day. But it wasn’t just due my strength, it was largely due to prayer.

One verse He gave me was 1 Kings 19:18. In first Kings chapter 19, Elijah is feeling alone and sorry for himself. He complains to God in verse 10, "I have zealously served the LORD God Almighty. But the people of Israel have broken their covenant with you, torn down your altars, and killed every one of your prophets. I alone am left, and now they are trying to kill me, too.”

If you are successful in maintaining your virginity, you may come to this point, yourself. I remember when I was 23 years old, all my Christian friends seemed to be falling to temptation. I began to wonder what I was saving myself for. That’s part of the problem of lowered expectations. Why should we even try to stay pure when it seems like everyone else is not?

But after God gives Elijah a glimpse of himself, he tells him in verse 18, “Yet I will preserve seven thousand others in Israel who have never bowed to Baal or kissed him!”

Elijah, you may think you are all alone, but I know where there are 7,000 more who have remained faithful. When you feel like you are the last one, God knows of thousands more. He was faithful to me, and found me a wife who had kept herself pure too.

I’ve found prayer to be the strongest tool in maintaining a life of purity. But prayer, by itself, is not enough. God allows us to keep our free will, and if we really want to sin, he will let us. Next week, I’ll be going through some other tools for winning the battle for sexual purity. In the meantime, whom is God leading you to pray for? For yourself? For your future spouse? For your son or daughter? For your grandchildren? Maybe for that unwed and pregnant teen in your neighborhood. Maybe for the guy or girl who’s turned to you for hospitality.

Let’s begin to pray today.

Lord, I’m thinking of someone who is facing temptation in a world of lowered expectations. Give that person moral strength, and if that moral strength fails, intervene in the situation to keep that person from fornication.

I pray for our elders, our deacons and our governing board, also for their spouses and children, that you would keep all of them from sexual sin, that they might be men and women of integrity, and examples to those around us.

I pray for the pastor that you have prepared to lead this church, that you would keep him and his wife faithful to each other and that you would be at work this Christmas season to refresh their marriage relationship.

For yours is the kingdom, and the power and the glory forever, Amen.

Part 2

available as an mp3 audio file only

StayingPure2.mp3