This is part of a devotional I am giving at a Christmas party.
Galatians 4:4 But when the
fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a
woman, born under the law. That one
verse is a kind of commentary on the Christmas story. When it was time, when God saw fit, God used
a young woman, probably younger than you, to bring the savior of the world to
us. “Born under the law,” means he was
Jewish, he lived like a Jewish person, but then he taught the faithful and
unfaithful Jewish people of his time that they were missing the point, that
they had exchanged the love and cherishing and mercy and kindness God had for
mankind into a set of rules and a means of pride.
I can’t get away from the elephant in the room
question, which is why. Why
Christmas? Why the nativity? Why incarnation? Why poverty instead of power, why a peasant
instead of a prince? Why did Mary and
Joseph have to flee to Egypt until Jesus was older? Why did Herod have to kill other children to
ensure his own kingdom (which he lost eventually anyway when he died?)
We evangelical Christians have a fault, and that is
that we are always trying to figure out God’s mind, and even worse, we talk
sometimes like we do. I hear preachers
and speakers on Christian radio saying things about God like they are reading
his mind. We should know better, of all
people. For My thoughts are not
your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the Lord. For as the
heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My
thoughts than your thoughts." (Isa. 55:7-ff)
We have it backwards, Job 34:21 NKJV. For His eyes are on the ways
of man, And He sees all his steps.
So, I have to
come back to two answers for those questions that are very clear in the bible. First, trust that He is doing it the best
way, despite our own perspective. And
second, the most clear teaching in the bible is that he came because he loved
us. Christmas is about love, but not
Hallmark Channel movie love. We don’t
get the Hallmark channel, but I was at my mother-in-laws in SC this weekend and
she has every station known to man. So I
watched two Hallmark Christmas movies.
Sweet and sappy and you always know how it’s going to end, right? No, this Christmas love is so deep, so wide,
so full, so immense, that it would orchestrate a nativity in a poor country to
show that God can turn power on its head.
It is so huge and strong that He came as a baby, fully man and fully
God, to teach us the way, and most of all to die in our place. Christmas can be a crazy time and I am not
sure why those of us who love Jesus let that happen. What I want you to think about more than
anything is that God’s plan is bigger than us, and his love is bigger than we
can imagine.
When I was
fifteen, I was invited to a church by some friends. I was raised in a different part of the
country. I had never really heard the gospel before and was not raised in a
Christian home as some are. One morning
the reality that I was a sinner hit me full force. Not just that I was a sinner and so was
everybody else, but that I was a sinner who actually sinned. And that was a problem. It was a problem I couldn’t do anything about
myself. That was good, because Jesus had
already done it by giving his life on the cross and rising from the dead for
everyone and for me. My job was to
believe it and after believing it, live like I believed it. That didn’t solve all my life’s problems or
make life easy; it did give me a center and purpose and meaning, which as a
young teenager I was going to be questioning soon. I am thankful God saved me
from making a lot of dumb mistakes early on.
But what I want to say is that if you are here and you would like to
talk about the Lord Jesus Christ and how he loves you so much that he would die
in your place, we would love to do that.
Thank you for letting me speak to you.
It has been a big blessing.
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