I thought I might do a little something, this year, that would help me focus on what this season is really about, and maybe it could help you, too. I’m going to take the story of Jesus’s birth, found in Luke 2, and go verse by verse, 1 through 24, to see what happens. Here we go…
Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. ~ Luke 2:11 NIV
Literally, since the beginning of time, generation after generation was told of the coming Messiah – the Savior, King, and Ruler of Israel and all heaven and earth. From the moment when sin entered the world, in a perfect garden over a shiny apple, God was there, foretelling to a shame-filled Adam and Eve, and a shameless Satan, the coming of His greatest gift to the world. For hundreds and hundreds of years, the Israelites listened to prophecy after prophecy of His coming, so we can only imagine what the Shepherds must have been thinking as they heard the actual content of the angel’s good news.
After everything played out, however, even after every single one of the prophecies had been fulfilled in the person of Christ, not everyone believed it. There is still a great faction that is continuing to wait for their promised Messiah. Isn’t that like us? God can tell us a thing over and over, in a hundred thousand ways, show us His great Hand in our lives again and again, and we’re still skeptical it’s Him. We talk ourselves out of believing He could’ve had a thing to do with any of it, opting instead for the more logical. The more explainable.
The thing is, there is absolutely nothing explainable about God.
So, we have to have faith. We have to trust that an omniscient, omnipresent God knows more than we do, and made a way for us – the ones He loves most – to rise above the burial ground of our own sin.
We have to trust that the Messiah He said He was sending, was the same one pronounced by His messenger.
Time is too short to be skeptical, my friends. Embrace the message of the angel. Believe the promises of a God who can’t break them.
Today a Savior has been born to YOU, and He IS Christ the Lord.
God is not man, one given to lies,
and not a son of man changing his mind.
Does he speak and not do what he says?
Does he promise and not come through? ~ Number 23:19 MSG
Whatever God has promised gets stamped with the Yes of Jesus. In him, this is what we preach and pray, the great Amen, God’s Yes and our Yes together, gloriously evident. God affirms us, making us a sure thing in Christ, putting his Yes within us. By his Spirit he has stamped us with his eternal pledge—a sure beginning of what he is destined to complete. ~ 2 Corinthians 1:20 MSG