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It's the hottest days of August and I want to begin tonight by preaching about Christmas. I know it sounds crazy, but I am definitely a Christmas preacher -- I could preach about the birth of Jesus Christ every week if God would let me. I like to hear the stories of the shepherds being startled by a flock of angels in the sky. I like to place myself in Joseph's shoes and ask myself how would I react if my girlfriend suddenly became pregnant supposedly by God Himself!? I like most of all the fact that the great God who created the universe humbled Himself to become a helpless infant and placed Himself in the care of His own creation. It blows me away that the King of the Universe was born in a horse barn. Yet somehow it makes sense, the man who was both the Great Shepherd and the Lamb of God begins His fleshly walk among sacrificial animals and common sheep herders! I love the story of Christmas.

There has been a steady movement in the world to cheapen the true meaning of Christmas. When I was a kid, it was writing the word with an x: X-mas. Throughout the 80s it was endless debate by so called professors that do not even have the Holy Ghost trying to explain that there was no such thing as the virgin birth. In the 90s the commercialization of Christmas increased to the point that Christmas decorations come out in September but they are a false Christmas: Frostys and Santas and Reindeer. Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with silly kid's tales, but there is a definite lack of focus on the reason for the season: Jesus Christ. You see: to carnal minds it may seem crazy to be preaching about the Christmas story in the hottest days of summer, but to a Christian, it always makes sense to preach the Christmas story because the story is about Jesus Christ! If there had been no birth of the King of Kings, then there would have been no cross! If there had been no cross, there would have been no blood! If no blood then there would have been no forgiveness! If there was no forgiveness then you I would be without hope and despondent, but I've got good news for you today: Jesus Christ has come and even though the world would try to remove Him from their festival, I'm here to tell you that He is everything to me! He is my focus for living He is the occasion in my life! And I still believe that it happened just like the scripture say it did: that a son was given to a virgin and that son was called the Wonderful, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace! Why do I believe it: because He has been those things to me! I'm glad I know who Jesus Christ is!

Today there is a new controversy and cheapening of the Christmas story. It is the debate over Jesus Christ's flesh. Some say that Jesus Christ was completely earthy and that He was essentially a man who became great through the Spirit of God: the scriptures don't support that and I don't buy it: Jesus Christ was God become flesh, and even though he was born of woman, His daddy was the Holy Ghost! He was a Holy Thing!

The other side says that Jesus Christ was only divine flesh. This is an old heresy that has recently made a come back in some circles. They say that Mary was little better than an incubator or a test tube for God to stay in a while and that Jesus was completely the product of the Spirit only and therefore His flesh was real flesh and bones but was divine flesh. In other words, they say that Mary was no more His mother than Joseph was His father. But I don't buy that theory either! I can't explain it to you because there hasn't ever been anyone like Jesus come into this world! But I can tell you that the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary and she conceived and spirit and humanity mixed in a way to produce a man that was God robed in flesh! He was both ALL God and ALL Man at the same time! I can't scientifically explain to you how exactly spirit mixed with DNA but I can tell you that in the womb of Mary, the Holy Spirit and humanity mixed together in that water sac to produce something heavenly upon this earth! When that baby gave the first cry of life in that stable, all of the spirit world took notice at the great miracle that was destined to change everything!

What's the point preacher?! I'll tell you what the point is: we are to be like Jesus! That was the whole point in Him coming to earth for us to be able to become like Him! Listen to the following scriptures:

If you are to be like Jesus Christ, then you must too have a spiritual birth. Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3 about "you must be born again of the water and the Spirit!" Peter preached the same message when he preached on the day of Pentecost that you must Repent of your sins, be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins (that's the born of the water part), and ye shall receive the Holy Ghost (that's the born of the Spirit part). When you were born the first time, you were born into sin, but when you are born again and you are filled with this precious Holy Ghost, the same Spirit that overshadowed Mary comes into your life! It sparks a conception of Spirit and flesh! I can't explain how the Spirit of God mixes with our repentant humanity, but I can tell you that it will change your life! It changes everything! Jesus has returned to earth through your submission to His Spirit! It's your personal Christmas! It's more than just believing that Jesus Christ existed or loved you, have you really followed Him by having a spiritual birth in your life? Believing in Him is good, but what about allowing Him to come into your life and change everything! What about being born again!? What about allowing His Spirit to mingle with your flesh to create something Holy and Pure and Magnificent! It's still about being born again of the water and the Spirit! We have too many people who are trying to be "Christians" (which means Christ-like) without having the birth experience! You will never be like Christ until you have followed the steps of His life, and you are really not a Christian until you've been born again of the water and the infilling of the Holy Ghost! You see, even though Mary gave birth to Him, she had to be on the Day of Pentecost to receive the Holy Ghost and the New Birth experience for herself! It wasn't enough that Jesus came from her, but she had to have Jesus living inside of her so that she could be as He is also! It's not enough to act like Jesus every once in a while and do good things according to the Words of Jesus: What I want to know is do you have Him inside you!? You must be born again!

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Our text in Jeremiah is one that is very special to me. If my memory serves me correctly I was about 8 or 9 years old when I first read this text. As an 8 or 9 year old boy I did not read the Bible every day as you might expect. But, at that age, we were having great revival in church and I was becoming very sensitive to God's Spirit. One day in my room, as I was looking for my name in the Bible, I experienced something for the very first time: God's voice! He spoke to me and just as clear as you hear my voice (I don't know if it was audible or not) He directed me to this passage of scripture and spoke to me that the passages of scripture applied to me! It wasn't very long until I felt the need to be baptized in Jesus' name. When I came up out of the water, God filled me with the Holy Ghost at the precious age of nine years old and I began to speak in tongues as the Spirit gave the utterance. I had been born again! Since then there has not been a year that I have not thought about this verse of scripture.

I do not think that this verse is special just to me. I believe that the scripture is true when it states that "God is no respecter of person!" If God told Jeremiah the prophet this and it was also true for this Jeremiah, then it is true for everyone under the sound of my voice! Before you were born, God knew you and ordained a work for you to do! He reserved a calling and an anointing that only you can fulfill! He has a plan for you!

I'm preaching to young people who are struggling with identity crisis and struggling to remain pure in a dirty, filthy, and morally corrupt world. I'm preaching to some of you who are aching for someone to care about you and the loneliness is hard to bear sometimes. I'm preaching to a generation that is constantly accosted by a media that screams you are not beautiful or thin or handsome or rich enough to be a success and who have been haunted by fears that have screamed to you all of your life that you will never be able to rise above the common norm of mediocrity.

But I'm here to tell you that all of that is hogwash! It's just a lie from the pits of hell! Let me tell you whom I am also preaching to tonight: I am preaching to young people who have been born again or else are interested in being born again and BEFORE that birth ever took place, God knew you and had a plan for you and has an anointing for your life and a will that supercedes any will of the world! I'm preaching to a chosen generation tonight! I'm preaching to the generation that could be the last one to live upon this earth as we know it! I'm preaching to the end time revival generation! And I've got a message for you: God does know what you are going through and God does care and God does believe in you, so much that before you were born He created a path for you to take and a road for you to walk and an anointing upon your life with which to break the curse of sin in your life! And He is not a God who has never known what it is like to walk in flesh but He is a God who had a spiritual birth in a natural world and grew up as a teenager and as a young man and was tempted in all manner like we are but without sin! Don't believe the lie from the pits of hell that God does not care, He does care, but He wants to know if you will give up your will for your life and follow Him! If you'll let fear intimidate you into being something other than what God wants to be. He wants to know if your love for Him supercedes you fear of being rejected as "different" by a sinful society. Jesus was different! He was born differently! He lived differently and He talked and walked differently! If you are going to follow Him and live like Him, you will have to be different from this filthy world!

The world wants you to be normal because Satan is scared of what God will do when someone gets the revelation that "I am born again into the kingdom of God" and before I was ever born, God knew me, knew my life's situations and has a work for me to do and has equipped me with everything I need to tear down the strongholds of Satan in my life and in those around me!

But some of you are like Jeremiah and saying, "I cannot serve you God and be used of you because I am still young" but God is saying "youth has nothing to do with it: before you were born I had a plan for you!" And then He commanded fear out of Jeremiah's life, touched him, put the Word of God in His mouth, and directed him: "there go pull down the enemies' strongholds and plant good things and walk boldly before those who would try to destroy you, for I the Lord God have called you and sanctioned you!"

I heard all of my life some negative preachers that would say things like "I don't know where the church will be in 20 years because I don't know if this generation really loves God or truth!" But I stand before you today twenty-six years old and while some of them have fallen away, I love God and I believe the truth stronger than most of them! And now I proclaim this generation: stop waiting for God to call you in the future, because before you were born, God had a purpose for you in His kingdom! It's time to sell out this glorious truth and way of life! It's time to stand tall for Jesus Christ and holiness instead of being normally sinful like the rest of the world! I proclaim to you to shake off the fear of insecurity and nothingness and allow God to touch you, arm yourself with His Word and no matter what your calling, get red-hot on-fire for God in this hour! I'm not worried about our future because I know some of you will answer the call of God to be faithful, but it is not just a call to a select few: Before you were ever born, God knew you, and even if you have not yet been born again, I'm telling you this is what your life has been missing! This is what you have been waiting for! You need to be born again so that you can begin to live in the promised plan of God! Even before you were born, God ordained you and God knew what you could be!

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God made Jeremiah aware of the calling upon his life right at the transitional moment in his life where he was between a boy and a man. Right at that moment where maturity and childhood meet. Where deep down he wanted to grow up but in his heart remained a child! You are at a critical age in your life. If ever you needed the will of God and to stand for truth, it is now. I'll even go a step further and preach to those of you who have been in church a while. If you don't answer the call of God now, chances are that you will not do it when you become older. In our society, the transitional age is between 15 and 18 years of age. Modern studies prove that the average Christians fasts and prays the same amount at 30 that they did at 17! You need to be aware that God has a purpose for your life! If you think your church is dead, then why don't you start a fire of revival. If nobody else is witnessing to people about the Holy Ghost, why don't you do so! If noone else seems to be breaking through in worship, then why don't you take the lead! You are old enough to have a move of God in your life and you are old enough to pray somebody through! I was 16 when I won my first person to God and my wife was younger. What are you waiting for!? As far as respect you want to be treated as an adult, but too many youth back up on the things of God and say "I'm too young!" I'm preaching to you that you are not too young to be sensitive to the things of God and sensitive to the revival fires of the Holy Ghost! Put away your fear, Jeremiah!

In our other text, Jesus was twelve years of age. He was at that age in Jewish culture where you are between a boy and a man. The age that you can first participate in the worship at the synagogue and at that age symbolically where so many are that are here tonight. Something came over Jesus at age twelve. We have no details after His toddler years, and we have only the record that we read in our text of his life before He was 30 years of age. I think that the greatest miracle that Jesus Christ ever performed was at the age of 12. His family is in town for the Passover, the annual feast of the killing of the Passover lamb and the very day that He would die and fulfill when He was 33. He knows this, of course, and He is twelve years old. He has not performed one miracle, Jesus has not done one thing to distinguish Himself from His brothers and sisters except that He has never sinned and yielded to temptation. Jerusalem is a madhouse as relatives see each other and cousins play together in the streets and over a million people camp out in the streets of about a 15 mile area. And this year something's different in Jesus' priorities. He has turned 12 years old and for the first time He can go into the temple and listen to the scribes teach about the Passover Lamb. Daddy and Momma are nowhere around. They assume that Jesus is with His cousins just like He has done the past 11 years, but this year, Jesus makes His way to the temple to listen to the teaching. This 12 year old boy, who is the perfect sacrificial lamb is listening to the scribes teach their opinions about it and something snaps or clicks or happens! He stands up and, as he has a right to do for the first time in His life, begins to comment upon the teaching! Only He does not speak as a twelve year old boy but as the One who wrote the scriptures! I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in that temple worship service. The scriptures do not tell us what Jesus corrected or what He revealed to the scribes and these men who had spent their lives studying scripture, but it blew them away! When Joseph and Mary finally find Jesus, He has spent three days in the temple and the scribes and teachers are asking Him the questions and He is giving them the answers! The Messiah is sitting in His temple!

His mother and Father rush up to Him. He looks at them and tells them "didn't you know I would be about my Father's business?" And the scriptures say that they did not understand. And then one of the greatest lessons of Jesus' life takes place. This Holy One, the one who belonged to sit in the temple and who inspired the very scriptures and who would be the very fulfillment exactly 21 years later obediently got up, and left the temple and scribes and followed Mary and Joseph and walked back to Nazareth to live among people who did not understand His nature and His calling. To live among people who did not respect and never would respect His calling. This is the last mention of Joseph in scripture. Jewish tradition tells us that he died shortly after Jesus turned twelve years of age. And so after having a flash of anointing and a glimpse of the perfect will of God in His life, Jesus returned to the carpenter's shop and as the eldest boy worked to provide for His family for 18 years in Nazareth! And all of those events only warrant one verse in the text:

I am not only preaching to young people who God had a will and a call far before your birth, but I am also preaching to some who have become disillusioned because after you sold out to God, you had a flash of what God wanted to do in your life and now it seems you find yourself among people who do not respect your difference and it seems as if nobody realizes the calling that God has placed upon your life! To top it off, you are laboring in something that is far from what you feel God has called you to do and there are events of life that seem to be telling you that your life is destined to be normal and mundane.

But listen to this preacher very carefully: God always calls you, then places you in a time of testing where He sees if you will be faithful or will walk away! David was anointed king of all Israel and then spent the next few years playing his harp for some smelly sheep. Yet before David had ever been born and been anointed God had ordained the events of his life because God knew that the lessons that he learned as a shepherd would be the ones that he needed to face the giant and rule the people! It was because he had faithfully fought the bear and the giant that gave David the faith and courage to risk everything against Goliath!

And Jesus despite working every day in a trade that He would never use. Despite not seeing the miraculous in His life nor being allowed to have any ministry whatsoever, yet remained faithful throughout those 18 years in Nazareth. And He increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man! And yet the patience that He was learning as a carpenter trying to shape wood into something useful were the very things that He would use to take 12 rough men and turn them into a force that would reach the world!

I'm preaching to somebody here tonight: Before you were born, God knew the events and the seeming devastations and the trials that you would face. The scriptures even say that He will not put more upon us than we can bear, so I will go as far as to say, that God even ordained the events of your life to be what they are! Why? Because He knew the special calling of your life before you were born and so He knows exactly what you must overcome in order to be able to handle that anointing! We all have our battles, but do not discouraged just because the work of God has not been immediate. God has not forgotten, you are just being tested and formed into what God wants you to be. Nothing that has happened in your life, good or bad has caught our God by surprise, in fact, He only allowed things to happen that could be beneficial to you! He knew, before you were ever born! When bad things come my way, I refuse to get bitter and question God but rather I trust in the scripture:

Did you catch that? Before you were born, God ordained your life. You are not a robot. God does not predestinate your life without giving you the power of choice. He does not know the path that you will choose, but He does know the end result of every possible choice that you could make. That's how He knows the future. And that is why He is urging you tonight to choose to live for Him, because even through the bad things, He knows that the outcome will be victorious! No matter what it seems like, if you choose to answer His call, you will become more like Jesus Christ!

Abraham, don't give up on God just because there's a few years between the promise and the fulfillment. David don't grow restless tending sheep. Be like Jesus in the Carpenter's shop, and use the time to grow and become more like Him so that you will be ready when the correct time comes! You do have a calling upon your life, it has been there since before you were born!

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Even after responding to the call of God and the call of his birth, Jeremiah tried to suppress the message that God had ordained to flow from his lips. He tried to be quiet. That was when he said "it's like fire, shut up in my bones." It felt like fire, not because he was so red hot for God like we sometimes preach but because he was fighting living like God wanted him to live and trying to live normal when he was anything but normal because God had ordained and anointed him! Tonight, these altars are open for those who would like to pray. If I have been preaching to you, then there is something burning within your soul that you know you have been fighting living and fulfilling what God wants you to do! You cannot survive trying to suppress it, because you are different, you are someone that like Jeremiah, God is revealing a plan that He had for you before you were ever born! Why don't you let God touch you and remove the fear tonight! If you have never been born again of the Holy Ghost, then you can receive it tonight. Why don't you come tell God that you want a change in your life! God has a plan for your life, but you must be born again of the water and the Spirit to receive it! Stop questioning God and allow Him to touch you, before you were born God knew!