Bearing Christ Within

Have you ever stopped to think about what it must have been like for Mary to carry Jesus Christ? She had the awesome privilege of carrying God’s Son, the Light of the World inside of her? She was also blessed to be able to carry the Lord of creation around in her arms as a baby. Imagine being able to pick up the Savior of the world and hold Him in your arms? It’s worth meditating on for a moment.

The Virgin Mary
This was no ordinary conception, since she was still a virgin. When the angel Gabriel appeared to her and told her she would conceive and bear a son whose name would be Jesus, she was surprised.

Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?" The angel answered and said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason the holy Child shall be called the Son of God. (Luk 1:34-35).

The angel’s answer explains how this was possible. It was through the power of the Holy Spirit that she would conceive. Notice he said the Holy Spirit would come upon her and the power of the Most High would overshadow her. This was how the Lord Jesus would enter her womb without any man’s involvement.

Who is the Mother of Jesus?
But now I’d like you to consider something that Jesus said when He was an adult, during His ministry.

On one occasion, while Jesus was speaking to a crowd, “One of the women in the crowd raised her voice and said to Him, 'Blessed is the womb that bore You and the breasts at which You nursed.’ But He said, ‘On the contrary, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.’” (Luk 11:27-28)

Do you see how Jesus responded when the woman tried to put the emphasis on Mary? He immediately contradicted her. He corrected her with the leading phrase, “On the contrary”. As Jesus saw it, those who are called blessed are those who hear God’s Word and do it.

Consider another occasion where Jesus spoke about His mother. "While He was still speaking to the crowds, behold, His mother and brothers were standing outside, seeking to speak to Him. Someone said to Him, 'Behold, Your mother and Your brothers are standing outside seeking to speak to You.' But Jesus answered the one who was telling Him and said, 'Who is My mother and who are My brothers?' And stretching out His hand toward His disciples, He said, 'Behold My mother and My brothers! For whoever does the will of My Father who is in heaven, he is My brother and sister and mother.' " (Mat 12:46-50)

Do you see how Jesus responded, when He was told His mother and brothers were outside? He said that whoever does the will of His Father in heaven is His mother and sister and brother.

Each and every person must have his or her own personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. It goes beyond a human blood relationship, and it’s much deeper than that. When you repent of your sin and ask Jesus into your heart, you enter into a personal relationship with Him through His divine, sinless blood that was shed for you on the cross. When that happens, He takes up residence within you through the Holy Spirit. You become born all over again to a new life – a spiritual life that will never end.

And in this new life, you carry Jesus Christ around inside of you wherever you go. You don’t need to go to some building or shrine to visit Him. He’s right there inside of you. And the new heart He gives you will actually want to do the will of His Father in heaven. His Holy Spirit will enable you to do His will, whereas before it was impossible for you to do it.

Those who do the will of the heavenly Father like this can call Jesus their older brother. In fact, as Jesus put it, they are even His mothers – whether male or female -- in more than one way. First, a disciple of Christ is the mother of Jesus Christ in the sense that he or she carries Jesus within. When Jesus lives in your heart, you bear him inside your body wherever you go. The same awesome privilege that Mary had belongs to every true disciple of Christ. We get to bear Him inside of us.

Another aspect of being His mother is bringing Him forth into the world into the lives of others. If you know Jesus personally, and you do the will of His Father in heaven, you will want to see others come to know Him, too. You will pray for them and share the good news with them that they can know Him, too. As you do so, some will repent and invite Him into their hearts also. Another new birth takes place each time another person does so. So we have the privilege and honor of bringing forth Christ into the world!

Putting it All Together
So while Mary was the first person to be the mother of Jesus, she was not the only one to do so. Whenever anyone tried to put the focus on Mary, Jesus immediately corrected them. In fact, every true disciple is the mother of Jesus and bears Christ within. It all happens by the power of the Holy Spirit, just as it did for Mary.

If you already know Jesus, let me ask you a question: Do you go about life with the awareness that Jesus Christ, God’s Son, lives inside of you? This is the only way to live as a disciple of Christ. We need to have a constant awareness of His presence within us.

Let me ask you another question: Are you bringing forth Christ into the world through your prayers, words, and actions? Through your life, others should be coming to know Him. This is evidence that you are His mother. Every disciple should be multiplying and reproducing disciples by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Here's my final question to you, my friend: Are you focusing on Mary and putting emphasis on her? If so, you need to heed the words of Jesus. You need to realize that the one who is blessed among women and the one who is blessed among men is the person who hears God’s Word and observes it.

Attribution notice: Most Scripture quotations taken from the NASB.

Do You Want to Know Him?
If you want to know Jesus personally, you can. It all begins when you repent and believe in Jesus.  Do you know what God's Word, the Bible says?

“Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’” (Mar 1:14b-15).  He preached that we must repent and believe.

Please see my explanation of this in my post called "Do You Want to Know Jesus?"

_________________________________________________

Len Lacroix is the founder of Doulos Missions International.  He was based in Eastern Europe for four years, making disciples, as well as helping leaders to be more effective at making disciples who multiply, developing leaders who multiply, with the ultimate goal of planting churches that multiply. His ministry is now based in the United States with the same goal of helping fulfill the Great Commission. www.dmiworld.org.

In What Year Was Jesus Born?

Do you know where the terms "B.C." and "A.D." come from? They are directly connected with the birth of Jesus Christ. We essentially determine the current year based on how many years it has been since the birth of Christ. So in what year was Christ born? It seems like it should be pretty simple to determine. If the year is 2010, then you would think he was born 2,010 years ago, right? Well, close, but not exactly. In order to know what year Christ was born, we need to better understand how the Gregorian calendar was developed.

The Original Idea
It began in the 6th century with a Scythian monk, Dionysius Exiguus, who resided in Italy. He first suggested in his Liber de Paschate ("Book of Easter") that we count the years starting from the time of Christ’s birth. Interestingly his system was not adopted until the 9th century.

Dating from the creation of Adam
Prior to that, people living in the Christian world counted years differently. They either counted according to the reign of the Roman emperor, or based on the biblically calculated time since Adam, known as Anno Mundi (AM). The AM system was derived from biblical passages. If you read Genesis 5 for example, you learn that Adam lived to be 930 years old. You will also see that Noah was 600 years old at the time of the flood. And he was born when his father Lamech was 182, which was 1056 years after Adam. Using genealogies and birth dates, as well as the reigns of kings, and the period of Jewish captivity, you can calculate how many years there were from the time Adam was created.

An interesting aspect of the AM calendar was that based on their calculations back at the time of Christ, they figured it was roughly 5,500 years since the creation of Adam, depending on who’s count you used. So this meant the world would come to an end around 500 AD. This was because of their interpretation of the Scripture which says a thousand years are as a day to God, and a day is as a thousand years. They also knew that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. So they believed that the seventh day (or seventh period of a thousand years) would begin immediately after the first six thousand years from the creation of Adam. The seventh millennium was considered by early Christians to be the “day of the Lord.”

Dating from the birth of Christ
Dionysius developed another calendar based on the historical information available to him at the time. He set the year 1 at Christ's incarnation. This is where the term Anno Domine comes from, which means "The Year of our Lord. These days we just abbreviate it as AD. In this calendar, everything before Christ is referred to as BC. An event that occurred one year before Christ was born was called 1 BC (there was no year “zero”). But he made a mistake when he determined the year of incarnation. He was about four years off. This mistake was discovered after he developed his new calendar, but he did not correct it. This error persisted when it was implemented 227 years later, and still remains to this day.

Based on well-documented historical events that occurred around the time of Christ’s birth, we can determine the year He was born with a fair degree of accuracy. We know that he was alive during the reign of Herod the Great, according to the biblical record. And we know that Herod was associated with people like his life-long friend, Mark Antony, who is a well-known and well-documented historical figure. Consequently the year of Herod’s death is fairly well-established historically, especially in the works of the Jewish historian, Josephus. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “After an unsuccessful attempt at suicide, Herod died at Jericho at the end of March or beginning of April in 4 BC.”

Dating from the founding of Rome
At the time of Herod the Great, the year was sometimes counted from the day when the city of Rome was founded. So each year would be considered anno urbis conditae (this is Latin for "in the year of the founded city" and is abbreviated AUC).

Marcus Terentius Varro introduced this method in the 1st century BC. Each year of this system of dating began on Founder's Day, which was April 21. It was rarely used in either the Roman or the Julian calendar. The predominant method of recording the date of events in those days was simply to name the two consuls that held office in a particular year.

But later around AD 400, this AUC system was used by the Iberian historian, Orosius. Then around AD 600, Pope Boniface IV also used it, in addition to the Anno Domini era (he reckoned AD 607 at AUC 1360).

Putting it All Together
We know that Dionysius Exiguus reckoned Christ’s birth to have occurred in 754 AUC, making it equal to AD 1. However, as I already mentioned, Christ was born during the time of Herod the Great, who certainly died in 749 or 750 AUC. Therefore, we can prove that Christ's birth actually occurred no later than 750 AUC. Because of this mistake regarding the date of Christ's birth, our calendar is off by about four years. In other words, if Christ was born as late as 750 AUC, that would place the Nativity shortly before the year 4 BC. That means that if the current year is 2015, then it is actually 2019 or so.

Now consider the six millenniums and how the early church believed that the seventh millennium would usher in the day of the Lord. In 1658 an Anglican archbishop named James Ussher, who lived in what is now Northern Ireland, calculated the chronology of the Old Testament. He reckoned the creation of Adam to have been in 4004 BC-- exactly 4,000 years before the birth of Christ. This means the 6,000-year mark was reached in 1997. Everything after that is part of the seventh millennium since Adam. If you believe as the early Christians did that the seventh millennium will usher in the day of the Lord, then for those who are serving Jesus Christ, these are exciting days that we live in.

In John’s epistle, written during the first century, he said it was the last hour when he wrote: “Children, it is the last hour; and just as you heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have appeared; from this we know that it is the last hour.” (1Jo 2:18). So the last days really began during the first century AD. And if we were in the last hour then, we know for certain that we are now in the final minute before Christ’s return.

Finally, the signs of the times indicate very clearly that we are very close to the return of our Lord Jesus. As Jesus told us to do, "But when these things begin to take place, straighten up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." (Luk 21:28). It's later than you think!!

Update: This article was originally posted December 26, 2010 and on July 31, 2018, I made a new discovery that corroborated my conclusion in this article. I happened to see Sid Roth's interview with Roy Reinhold, in which he explained how hidden Bible codes reveal the future. I highly recommend watching it! It was so amazing to me that I went to his website and found his five-part article on the Birth of Yeshua (Jesus), which he published on February 1, 2001. I was even more amazed to find that through his research into Bible codes, he discovered that the Lord Jesus was born in the Jewish year 3759, which is the fall of 3 BC. I'd say that is amazingly close, considering my article had not been published yet when his was written, and I did not even know about his article when I wrote mine. I was off by only 2 years with respect to the year of his birth.

Here are the links to the five-part article by Roy Reinhold:

Exact Date Of Yeshua's Birth, part 1
Bible Code Matrix of Yeshua's Birth, part 2
Angelic Announcement to Mary & Yeshua's Conception, part 3
Brit Milah at the Temple on the 8th Day, part 4 
Other Scholarship Proving the Exact Date of Birth of Yeshua (Jesus), part 5

Attribution notice: Most Scripture quotations taken from the NASB.

Author's note: If you enjoyed this post, I also recommend reading On What Day Was Jesus Born?, Miraculous Birth of Jesus, and The Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ, as well as the other articles on the Home Page of this blog. You can also find my complete collection of blogs at Writing for the Master.

Do You Want to Know Him?
If you want to know Jesus personally, you can. It all begins when you repent and believe in Jesus.  Do you know what God's Word, the Bible says?

“Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’” (Mar 1:14b-15).  He preached that we must repent and believe.

Please see my explanation of this in my post called "Do You Want to Know Jesus?"

_________________________________________________

Len Lacroix is the founder of Doulos Missions International.  He was based in Eastern Europe for four years, making disciples, as well as helping leaders to be more effective at making disciples who multiply, developing leaders who multiply, with the ultimate goal of planting churches that multiply. His ministry is now based in the United States with the same goal of helping fulfill the Great Commission. www.dmiworld.org.

On What Day Was Jesus Born?

While reading God's Word a couple days ago on December 24th, I came across the verse in Luke 1 that said the angel Gabriel came to Mary in the sixth month of the pregnancy of her cousin Elizabeth, who was expecting John the Baptist. I wanted to learn more about when Jesus was born. So I went online and found a very good article that explains when John the Baptist was conceived and born.

Since Jesus was conceived six months after John, we know when He was born. It is most probable that Jesus was conceived on the Feast of Lights, which is celebrated on the 25th day of the Jewish month known as Kislev (this occurs during the November-December timeframe). So Jesus was most likely born on the feast of Tabernacles on the 15th day of the month of Tishri (this occurs in the September-October timeframe).

On this holiday, all the Jewish people would make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from far away. Since Bethlehem was only 5 miles from Jerusalem, it’s reasonable to expect that all the inns in Jerusalem and Bethlehem would be full of visiting pilgrims attending the feast. This would explain why there was no room for Joseph and Mary in the inn and why she had to give birth to Jesus in a stable.

There is no place in Scripture where we are told explicitly, exactly what day Jesus was born on. And there is no place in Scripture where we are told to celebrate His birthday. Neither do we find any Scriptural record of the early Church celebrating His birthday. In fact, the date when the world celebrates Christmas is closer to the time when Jesus was conceived, rather than the time He was born.

We know that the Jewish Feasts are types of Christ, and that Jesus was sacrificed as the paschal Lamb on the Jewish Passover feast. This is explicitly stated in Scripture. And it was no mere coincidence, but rather a fulfillment of the feast, in which a lamb was sacrificed and its blood upon the homes of God's people protected their first born children from the death angel who was passing over.

Likewise, it is reasonable to expect that Jesus was also conceived and born on Jewish feasts, as well. If He was conceived on the Feast of Lights, that would be appropriate, since He is the Light of the World, who came as a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory for God's people Israel (Lk 2:32). He came like the rising sun from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death (Lk 1:79). And if He was in fact born on the Feast of Tabernacles, what a perfect time it was, since it was a time of rejoicing and celebration of deliverance from slavery in Egypt (Leviticus 23:42-43)! Jesus has come to set us free from the bondage of slavery to sin. He has provided deliverance from hell, death and the grave for all who believe in Him!!!

Update: This article was originally posted December 26, 2010, and on July 31, 2018, I made a new discovery that corroborated my conclusion in this article. I happened to see Sid Roth's interview with Roy Reinhold, in which he explained how hidden Bible codes reveal the future. I highly recommend watching it! It was so amazing to me that I went to his website and found his five-part article on the Birth of Yeshua (Jesus), which he published on February 1, 2001. I was even more amazed to find that through his research into Bible codes, he discovered that the Lord Jesus was conceived on the first day of Hannukah or the Festival of Lights, just as I stated in this article. He states, "The matrix shows that as 24 Kislev was ending and 25 Kislev beginning, marking the beginning of Hanukkah, that the power of the Holy Spirit came upon Mary and she conceived."

Then he states, "The matrix shows...1 Tishri as the exact day of Yeshua's birth." 1 Tishri is the Jewish New Year's Day called Rosh Hashana, meaning literally "head of the year." Rosh Hashana is know in English as the Feast of Trumpets, and it is marked by the blowing of the Jewish shofar, or ram's horn,  to commemorate the ram that God provided to Abraham in place of Isaac. This festival corresponds with going and telling the world that Yeshua Himself has become that ram and ultimately died in our place.

In 3 BC, 1 Tishri was on September 11. The center of the matrix that shows the Lord's birthday says, "Holiday of the Nativity" and "Sing (or Rejoice), My people." The complete matrix has many key words in it like "Yeshua (Jesus)," "Messiah," "Wonderful," "Counselor," "Son of Man," "born," "manger," "Beit (Bethlehem)," "Lekhem (Bethlehem)," "star," "angels," "shepherds," "Miryam (Mary)," and "Yosef (Joseph)." It also contains the words "Hakodesh (Holy)," "Ruach (Spirit)," "from heaven," and "to the earth," as well as many other key words that connect it with the biblical account of the nativity of Christ.

Reinhold goes on to state "Yeshua is the second Adam, and the rabbi's have long taught that Adam's birthdate was on 1 Tishri. So it is no coincidence that the second Adam has the same exact birth date." I had surmised that the Lord was born on 15 Tishri, and although he had also expected to find the same thing, he has discovered that it was actually 1 Tishri. I'd say that is amazingly close, considering my article had not been published yet when his was written, and I did not even know about his article when I wrote mine. I was off by 14 days from his findings with respect to the day of the Lord's birth.

Finally, his discoveries of the conception and birth dates of Christ in the Bible codes not only corroborated my conclusions, but he points out that "the conception of Mary was shown to be 271 days prior to the birth date," as would be expected, based on average gestation periods. And he discovered that the Brit Milah (dedication and circumcision) at the Temple--took place on 8 Tishri just as we would expect it to, according to Jewish custom that says it must be done on the 8th day. Glory to God! 

Here are the links to the five-part article by Roy Reinhold (part 2 contains the above information):

Exact Date Of Yeshua's Birth, part 1
Bible Code Matrix of Yeshua's Birth, part 2
Angelic Announcement to Mary & Yeshua's Conception, part 3
Brit Milah at the Temple on the 8th Day, part 4 
Other Scholarship Proving the Exact Date of Birth of Yeshua (Jesus), part 5

Author's note: If you enjoyed this post, I also recommend reading In What Year Was Jesus Born?, The Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ and The Son of Man, as well as the other articles on the Home Page of this blog. You can also find my complete collection of blogs at Writing for the Master.

Do You Want to Know Him?
If you want to know Jesus personally, you can. It all begins when you repent and believe in Jesus.  Do you know what God's Word, the Bible says?

“Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’” (Mar 1:14b-15).  He preached that we must repent and believe.

Please see my explanation of this in my post called "Do You Want to Know Jesus?"

_________________________________________________

Len Lacroix is the founder of Doulos Missions International.  He was based in Eastern Europe for four years, making disciples, as well as helping leaders to be more effective at making disciples who multiply, developing leaders who multiply, with the ultimate goal of planting churches that multiply. His ministry is now based in the United States with the same goal of helping fulfill the Great Commission. www.dmiworld.org.