Welcome to Everyday Truth with Kurt Skelly. We believe the Bible is true and relevant to everyone, everywhere, every day.

This Christmas season, we're revisiting a series called Advent, where Kurt leads us through the Christmas story in a deeper, more meaningful way.

We hope it encourages you to see that Christmas is all about Jesus.

Now, here's today's episode.

Hey, Luke chapter two in your Bible, and we are just finishing the last couple of episodes of this series on Advent.

And I told you yesterday that we would be in verse 16.

So I want you to look at it. Verse 16, where the Bible says about the shepherds, and they came with haste and found Mary, remember they were searching.

So the word find there would note that they're looking. What are they looking for? They're looking

for the baby that is wrapped in rags. They're looking for the baby that is wrapped in rags.

They're looking for the baby that is in a manger, in a horse trough, not just any old baby.

The sign that this is indeed the son of God is the fact that he'll be in these abjectly poor conditions.

So they did. They found Joseph and Mary and they found the baby lying in a manger. So there

it is. The validation of the message they heard. It's very similar to what happened to Mary.

Okay, remember what happened to Mary in Luke chapter 1?

What happened to Mary was she received a message from an angel, Gabriel.

And Gabriel said at the end of that announcement to Mary, he said,

and by the way, your cousin Elizabeth, whose well beyond childbearing years,

is also pregnant. She's going to have a child. So that was the physical sign that was given to

Mary. Obviously, the sign was the fact that she was seeing an angel, but just like the shepherds,

the angel gave a physical sign. So what did

Mary do? Mary left Nazareth. She traveled down to the hill country of Judah, and she saw Elizabeth,

and it was validated what the angel had said. So here's a validation to the shepherds of what they had been told.

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