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Christmas
THE
M IR ACLE
Experience the Blessing
J A C K W. H A Y F O R D
G
Jack W. Hayford, The Christmas Miracle
Chosen Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 1999, 2014. Used by permission.
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Contents
Preface 000
Introduction 000
Part One: The Idea of Incarnation
1. A Timeless Kind of Wonder 000
Where life or love, hope or strength, promise or patience have
disappearedor have never been present at all-God comes to
offer the Mary miracle.
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Contents
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Contents
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Preface
And Mary said:
My soul magnifies the Lord,
And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior. For He has
regarded the lowly state of His maidservant; For behold,
henceforth all generations will call me blessed. For He who
is mighty has done great things for me, And holy is His name.
And His mercy is on those who fear Him
From generation to generation.
He has shown strength with His arm;
He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their
hearts. He has put down the mighty from their thrones, And
exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things,
And the rich He has sent away empty. He has helped His
servant Israel, In remembrance of His mercy, As He spoke
to our fathers, To Abraham and to his seed forever.
Luke 1:4655
Jack W. Hayford, The Christmas Miracle
Chosen Books, a division of Baker Publishing9Group, 1999, 2014. Used by permission.
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Introduction
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From joy to guilt, or from Happy-to-be to What-willhappen-to-me? the full spectrum of emotions surrounds
the subject of pregnancy.
A pregnancy is the ultimate analogy. Everything in life
is like it. As with a pregnancy, everything in life starts
with a possibility and proceeds to a reality. The pattern of
conception-to-delivery is rooted in the founding fundamentals of Gods operational order of things. And life always
is a miracle.
Thats why Ive written this little book. Because I want to
point the way to life at its deepest, fullest and richestat its
miracle level.
To see lifes miracle possibilities most clearly, Im pointing
to the most incredible and important pregnancy in history:
Marys. But dont make the mistake of thinking this is a book
only for women or about babies.
This is a book for all genders, in its practicality.
Its a book for believers, prophetically.
And very much a book for you, personally.
Im inviting you to travel with me to the drab, uninviting
town called Nazareth, to review how God is able to bring life
into the most barren settings and to breathe hope into the
most unpromising situations.
The story we examine is too well-known. Its been read
so many Christmases that the seeds of wonder it holds have
fallen on ears that hear only the one miracle: His birth. But
the larger truth is that He, in fact, came to birth miracles in
all of us as a way of life.
Jack W. Hayford,12
The Christmas Miracle
Chosen Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 1999, 2014. Used by permission.
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Introduction
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PA RT ON E
Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God
to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to
a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The
virgins name was Mary.
Luke 1:2627
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1
A Timeless Kind of Wonder
t started when Phil became pregnant. Thats probably the moment God began to bring greatness
out of the garbage.
Teds pregnancy came full term when he decided to deal
with the abortion he had financed in college for the coed he
had been with.
Mine began in a car on the freewayand God spoke.
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them. And the answer is yesto you! In spite of our finiteness, our fallibility and our fears, you and I are candidates
for such a visitation because qualifying for the Mary miracle
doesnt require a self-accomplished goodness. It only calls
us to be open to a God-appointed grace.
The Mary miracle calls us all to come back to a moment
when eternity penetrated time with the power that can
change all our days and hoursour lives, past, present and
future. That incredible encounterwhen a Jewish maiden
named Mary was met with divine grace in a dusty town called
Nazareth two thousand years agoset forward more than
the incarnation of the worlds Savior.
Marys miracle opens the promiseindeed, the pathwayfor God to incarnate His gracious purpose and power
in the experience of anyone who will open to the same order
of miracle. Because God is no respecter of persons (see Acts
10:34), He shows what He can do in some lives, as a sample
of what He can do in all lives. He does these apparently occasional wonders, not to preempt our hopes for the same
but to promote them. So in Mary He brought to reality the
ultimate hopeJesusand in doing that He pointed not only
to the way of salvation, but also to the possibilities of Christ
in you, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27, italics added).
That order of miraclethat genre, dimension or type
called the Mary miracleis not solely defined by the astounding physical reality of the supernatural conception Mary
experienced. Because even then the miracle wasnt only physical. Beyond that biologically transcendent event, when a real
child was generated within a virgin womb by the creative
power of Gods declared Word, heaven came down to us.
Jack W. Hayford, The19Christmas Miracle
Chosen Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 1999, 2014. Used by permission.
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