We live in a world of bigger and better and new. If you buy a phone, it’s obsolete before you leave the store! If you go for the latest hair style it’s so last week before it’s dry! It’s really hard to “wow” us anymore. We are a high maintenance culture.
I wonder if that cynicism has crept into Christmas?
Do we marvel anymore that Christ came into our world, not as a pampered royal, but as a poor peasant’s son?
Do our souls quake with deepest joy and gratitude that even in His arrival, He chose to identify with the broken, the beleaguered, and the beaten down?
Excited shepherds followed angelic directions to worship at the infant’s manger, and a mysterious “star” pointed unwelcome foreign dignitaries to the child’s home.
Do we notice that, from the very beginning, this beautiful Savior of ours came to the broken that He might be utterly broken Himself?
Pastor and author Tim Keller has said,
“If you believe in Christmas—that God became a human being—you have an ability to face suffering, a resource for suffering that others don’t have. We sometimes wonder why God doesn’t just end suffering. But we know that whatever the reason, it isn’t one of indifference or remoteness. God so hates suffering and evil that He was willing to come into it and become enmeshed in it.”
And Dorothy Sayers said of Jesus,
“He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it was worthwhile.”
My prayer for you this Christmas is that in the midst of the business and crazy drivers out there on the freeway and in the mall you might find time to kneel once more at the feet of the baby who came to save us all. This is where our worship belongs. This is where our souls find rest. This is the greatest “wow” moment of all.
“For a child is born to us, a son is given to us.
The government will rest on his shoulders.
And he will be called:
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
Isaiah 9:6