Welcome to the Mark Driscoll Ministries podcast. To find more Bible teaching from

Pastor Mark, visit Mark Driscoll. Thank you for listening and being a part of

Mark Driscoll Ministries. And remember, it's all about Jesus.

All righty, Merry Christmas. Good to have you all.

If you've got a Bible, go to the Book of Philippians.

We're taking a little bit of time, study through this great book of the Bible,

and we're doing so heading into the biggest party that the world

has ever known or ever thrown and that's the birthday of Jesus, amen.

Jesus is the biggest person in the history of the world and Christmas is the biggest party in the world.

It's amazing that the whole world stops to celebrate one guy's birthday.

That's how big he is.

And what's curious is we know where he was born in

Bethlehem. We don't know exactly when he was born. The Bible doesn't tell us which

month that Jesus was born and we don't really know. All it says is shepherds were in the field. That's all it tells us.

And so the way we got this particular date for Christmas, December 25th, the early Christians were part of an empire called Rome and it was a

pagan empire with lots of pagan holidays. One of them was called Saturnalia and

the Christians already had the day off and they figured well we don't

know when Jesus was born let's use this day off to celebrate his birth so

that's how we got this particular date for the holiday.

That being said, we don't know exactly

when Jesus was born, but we know how he was born.

We know that he was born of his mother, Mary.

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