The God Who Chose a Teenager
There’s something we miss when we sanitize the Christmas story. We soften it with candlelight and carols, and wrap it in nostalgia until it becomes comfortable. Familiar. Safe. But if you strip away the sentiment for just a moment—if you really look at what happened—you find something that should stop us in our tracks and cause wonder to overcome us.
God chose a teenager to bear His Son.
Not a queen. Not a priest’s wife. Not a woman of influence or established reputation. Mary was probably fourteen, maybe fifteen years old when the angel appeared. Young enough that we’d call her a child by today’s standards. Old enough only by the harsh mathematics of survival in the ancient world of the middle east.
And to her—this girl from Nazareth, this nobody from nowhere—God entrusted everything.
The Scandal of It
Think about the sheer audacity of His choice. God could have orchestrated anything. He could have chosen power, prestige, protection. He could have ensured His Son entered the world surrounded by credentials no one could question, with ominous armies and grandeur announcements and all the trappings of legitimacy.
Instead, He chose scandal.
He chose the kind of entrance that would make people whisper, doubt and turn away. He placed the rescue plan for all creation in the womb of a teenage girl who would have to explain the inexplicable. Who would watch her reputation crumble before the baby even arrived. Who would feel the weight of divine purpose pressing down on shoulders that should have been carrying only the ordinary dreams of youth—who to love, what kind of life to build, what tomorrow might hold.
The angel told her she was “favored,” but favor here first meant something different than we imagine. It meant fear. It meant Joseph nearly walking away. It meant a hurried journey while nine months pregnant, a birth in a stable, a childhood spent fleeing to the foreign land of Egypt because a paranoid king wanted her baby erased.
This is how God entered our world. Through the most vulnerable door possible. Through an adolescent girl who had to say yes to something she certainly couldn’t fully understand, something that would cost her everything she thought her life would be.
And here’s what’s striking: she said yes anyway.
“Let it be to me according to your word.”
Six words that changed eternity, for you, me, and for all creation.
The Word Made Flesh
A teenager bore the Son of God. Let that sit in your thoughts for a moment.
The Creator of the universe—the One who spoke galaxies into existence, who holds time itself in His hands—became small enough to fit inside a teenage girl’s womb. He didn’t just visit earth as a distant observer. He didn’t appear fully formed, ready-made for ministry. He entered through the same door we all do: birth. Embryo inside a mother, in a messy, painful, dangerous birth.
He was nursed. He wore diapers. He learned to walk, to talk, to use His hands. He skinned His knees. He got hungry. He grew tired. He experienced every ordinary, humbling, limiting aspect of being human.
Immanuel. God with us.
Not God above us, safely distant, observing our struggles from the comfort of heaven. God with us. In it. In the middle of our mess and our pain and our very human existence. God as one of us.
This is what theologian N.T. Wright means when he talks about the incarnation as the ultimate act of divine solidarity. God didn’t send a message. He didn’t dispatch an ambassador. He came Himself, experiencing life from the inside, from the vulnerable beginning to the brutal end.
But Why?
Here’s a question that should arrest us: Why would God do this?
Why would He subject Himself to such limitation, such vulnerability, such suffering? Why would He trade the worship of angels for the suspicion of men? Why would He choose a cross over a throne?
If you’re skeptical about faith, this is a question worth wrestling with. Because the answer Christians scriptures give isn’t what you’d expect from a religion invented by humans trying to feel better about themselves.
The answer is love.
Not the sentimental, Hallmark-card kind of love. The relentless, pursuing, self-sacrificing kind. The kind that doesn’t wait for us to clean ourselves up first. The kind that doesn’t demand we prove ourselves worthy before showing ourselves in His presence.
God sent His Son because we needed Him. Because we were separated—cut off from the source of life itself by our own rebellion, our own brokenness, our own insistence on living life our way. We were dying, and we couldn’t save ourselves. No amount of trying harder or being better or following rules could bridge that chasm.
So He crossed it for us.
As one of my mentors often put it, Jesus didn’t come primarily to be our example, though He is that. He didn’t come primarily to be our teacher, though He is that too. He came to be our Savior—to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. “But God demonstrates His love for us in this: while we were still sinners, He came in vulnerability, entering our world in obscurity as a human embryo, with His sight set on the cross, Christ died for us.”
The Pattern of His Choosing
There’s something else worth noticing here, something that speaks to how God operates, how He sees, what He values.
God chose Mary not despite her youth and ingloriousness, but in a way that makes those very things part of the point. Throughout Scripture, this is His pattern. He chooses shepherds over kings, younger brothers over firstborns, the barren over the fertile, the weak over the strong. In fact, historians believe Jesus Himself chose His primary disciples from the poor, common, despised, many of which were teenagers.
God does this, I think, to make something clear: His kingdom doesn’t run on the fuel of human achievement or status or credentials. It runs on something else entirely. On His Spirit. And on our willingness to surrender to Him. To trust. In the simple but profound act of saying yes to Him, even when we don’t understand, even when we’re in over our heads, even when we’re terrified.
Mary had no résumé. No platform. No influence. She had only her willingness, her humility, her trust, her yes.
And it was enough.
Because God’s power, as Paul later writes, is made perfect in weakness. His strength shows up most clearly precisely when we’re facing something impossible, when we’re out of our depth, when all we can do is say yes and hold on and trust that He knows what He’s doing.
For Those Who Wonder
Maybe you’re reading this and you’re not sure what you believe about Jesus. Maybe the whole thing seems too fantastical, too good to be true, or—if we’re honest—not good enough given how much suffering still exists in the world.
I get that. I respect that. Those are honest objections worth wrestling with.
But consider this: if you were going to invent a religion, would this be the narrative you would create? Would you have your God enter the world as a baby, born to an unwed teenage mother in a backwater province of an occupied nation? Would you have Him grow up as a handyman’s son, gather a ragtag group of followers, get Himself executed as a criminal, and claim that was somehow the rescue plan for humanity?
It’s almost too absurdly unheroic by human standards.
Which is part of why I find it so believable.
This isn’t the story we would tell if we were making it up. It’s the story of a God who loves us enough to enter our suffering, not to explain it away or fix it instantly, but to be with us in it. To show us that He understands. To bear the weight of it Himself. As one of us.
The Invitation
The name tells you everything you need to know: Immanuel. God with us.
Not God watching from a distance. Not God disappointed in us but tolerating us from afar. God with us. Present in our ordinary moments and our darkest nights. With us when we fail. With us when we doubt. With us when life falls apart and we don’t know what comes next. With us to our dying breath.
This is why He sent His Son—because His love is relentless.
Because He refuses to leave us orphaned, alone, without hope. Because His heart breaks for the distance between us and Him, and He did what needed to be done to close that gap. To bring us close! To bring us to the Father’s bosom, to His lap as His beloved restored.
A teenager bore the Son of God, and through her yes—through her willingness to be part of something bigger than herself, something she couldn’t fully control or comprehend—salvation entered our world.
This Christmas, as you hear the familiar story again, let yourself feel the strangeness of it. The scandal. The risk. The beautiful, impossible vulnerability of God choosing to need us, to work through us, to enter our world in the most humble way imaginable.
And ask yourself why.
Why would God do this, unless His love for you is more relentless, more pursuing, more determined than you ever dared imagine? A relentless love that is reckless in pursuit of His adored ones. Yes, you are adored.
Remember today: the angel’s announcement to Mary wasn’t just for her. It was for all of us: “Do not be afraid.” Do not be afraid of your inadequacy. Do not be afraid of your past. Do not be afraid that you’re not enough or that you’ve wandered too far or that it’s too late for you.
God chose a teenager to bear His Son. He can choose you too.
He already has.
The question is whether you’ll say yes.
This is the invitation.
