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"His Unspeakable Gift"Topics: Jesus,Transformation, Christmas
The foolish religious leaders mocking Jesus, cried out, “He saved others,
He can not save himself!” The place was just out side Jerusalem on a hill
called the skull. These blind leaders were right on one hand, yet they very
wrong on the other hand. They were wrong in that Jesus rose from the dead and in glory showed himself as the very Son of God. The religious crowd was right in that Jesus could not save himself from the cross and still provide our salvation. The cross represented the “cup” that Jesus had to drink.
In the mind of God, Jesus the Messiah had to identify with our sins, our
pain, our suffering. It was for this that Jesus had been born in Bethlehem.
His birth was a special birth, because God Himself was entering into the human race through the avenue of a virgin’s womb. Jesus’ humanity was prepared we are told by the Holy Spirit. He was the promised seed of the woman that would crush Satan’s head.
The world into which Jesus was born was a cruel and evil one, not unlike
ours. The only gospel writers in the New Testament that record the birth of
Jesus are Matthew and Luke. Matthew tells of kings coming to worship Jesus.
Matthew is interested in the reader knowing that Jesus himself is a King.
On the other hand, Luke, the gentile writer and associate of the Apostle
Paul, tells of shepherds coming to worship Jesus on the same night that Jesus
was born. The shepherd was a common man, no royalty, a hard working “field” hand, who tended the livestock. The life of a shepherd was routine and predictable.
Most of us have lives that are mundane, ordinary. Jesus made an
incredible difference in the lives of these shepherds. Yes, some wise kings
did come to Jesus the Messiah, they returned to carry out their “kingships” in
their own lands with the knowledge that God was now with them. But the
shepherds took their good news of great joy back to the fields with them; they took faith with them. They still had to go back to their places in life. They had to finish their years out as shepherds and die.
Though they were ordinary shepherds, these shepherds could never be the
same; they had found the Messiah, the saviour of the world! The stars, the
fields, the mountains, the sheep, all would now be different in the shepherds’
eyes! With the Christ of Christmas in one’s heart, the life of an ordinary
person becomes exceptional! Christmas means more than the world can imagine.
Jesus makes an ordinary life an adventure!
(Published first in Hospital Newsletter, December of 1998)
(Inspirational submitted by: Chaplain Tommy W. Smith)