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Welcome to 'Changed' a podcast celebrating transformative encounters with Jesus Christ. Each episode unfolds powerful testimonies of profound life changes, providing inspiration for your spiritual journey. Join our community, drawing strength and encouragement to deepen your relationship with God. Witness the irrefutable evidence of lives dramatically changed by His love. We're here to inspire hope, reinforcing God's relentless pursuit, and sparking the desire to seek a life profoundly transformed. Let's chase after God together. Your journey to deeper faith starts here.
Brent Stone (00:00.546)
Hello and welcome to the Change Podcast. I'm Brent and I'm very excited that you're tuning in today. This is a special podcast episode where we get to just rest in the celebration. And yes, I did say rest. This time of year, I don't know if anyone else is with me on this, but one of my most fond
aspects, you know, one of the things I'm fondest of, I guess, in this time of year is resting and not rushing around to do 100 different things all of the time and really reflecting on
God with us, coming to earth in human form as Jesus. And it is powerful.
I think so much of the time, and I'm included in this, I just get so wrapped up in things going on, work, family responsibilities, things that can be good. But what ends up happening is that if I don't make space in the everyday for Jesus, then there is an emptiness. And it's almost like this gap that has to be filled. And...
We're not immune to this, you know, regardless of where people are on their spiritual journey. If we neglect to spend time with our creator, we do find ourselves trying to fill a void with other things that only he can fill. And the verse today that I want everyone to stop and reflect on is Matthew 1.23, and that reads, look, the virgin will conceive a child. She will give birth to a son.
Brent Stone (01:54.086)
and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God is with us. And it's short, but when we stop to think, God created this place we live in, earth, and the heavenly realm and all the angels and everything's included in that, all of the...
things going on, spiritual warfare, you know, all the things that, the spiritual warfare is being dealt with in the spiritual realm by God. But here's what's really wild. In order for our redemption, one of the things that had to happen was God coming to earth in human form as Jesus. And wow, what a...
What a game plan. And then also knowing that the only way to ransom us was to then sacrifice himself and die a human death to be raised three days later.
and just incredible knowing and prophetic power of everything that came to a head when he was born. Think about it. The wise men, we don't know how many there were, but we do know that there were three gifts. And I learned this from a message that I received through our church. Catherine Johnson spoke on this and it was so, so much. It moved me so much. She talked about the gifts. There's three different types of gifts.
We actually don't know in Scripture how many magi there were, but they gave gold, which was obviously an honoring gift for kings. Frankincense, which was a beautiful smelling incense that was of course used in the offerings and the tabernacle and offered to God in different forms through the Old Testament. And then there's myrrh.
Brent Stone (04:10.678)
which also was a sweet smelling substance, but was also used as an embalming agent for burial. And you think about that. And then also all of the logical side of this, which is looking at all the corroborative evidence out there of the 5,000 or so plus manuscripts for the Old Testament written and transcribed into.
so many different languages around the world, different countries from thousands and thousands of years ago. And this isn't an apologetics message, but what it is, it's just, it's really powerful to look at all of the different prophecies that lead up to God coming to earth and human form as Jesus. And there's hundreds of
prophecies that point to Jesus coming to earth, living the way that he did, doing the things that he would do, and then dying a human death to be raised three days later. And it's, John Bevere actually spoke about the odds of if this wasn't true, there would be basically like one and some number that's just unfathomable.
the amount of chances of actually it not being true. The fact that everything happened the way that it did was like a one in some number that has 30 or 40 plus zeros behind it. And when you really factor in all of the different things and how...
all these different manuscripts were collected and gathered over the thousands of years to be put together written by different people in different countries, hundreds of years apart over the course of millennia. It's just really wild that it all fits together in a succinct message.
Brent Stone (06:18.922)
How incredible is that? And we get to celebrate all of that plan, that masterful plan of redemption for us being brought here, God sending his son Jesus, him in human form.
living among us.
I leave you with this, Merry Christmas and Matthew 1:23 - "Look, the virgin will conceive a child. She will give birth to a son and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God is with us." Merry Christmas to you and yours.