We’re entering in to the holidays ... Christmas lights, gifts, delicious meals, time spent with family ... Christmas is a time of rejoicing for most of us. A time when we love to recharge our batteries!
Yet, the first Christmas wasn’t a comfortable day. In fact, it was a day of great weakness. Imagine the decorations: a required census ordered by the Roman occupation; a craggy, lost village in the middle of the countryside; a shelter for animals; a young woman exhausted from a long trip; and to one side, a few shepherds, no one to welcome the King of Kings ...
This Christmas carol so accurately portrays the night of Jesus’s birth, when the greatest of miracles came in the greatest form of weakness…
“O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.”
Bethlehem wasn’t the place to be, a fashionable or “up and coming” city! This little town was neither a commercial capital, nor a cultural capital, or even less a tourist destination. It was a lost village in the middle of nowhere ... an insignificant place.
But did you know that it pleases God to use insignificant things to glorify Himself? Did you know that He loves to manifest Himself in the places no one sees, to make Himself known through people no one applauds?
“But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty” (the Bible, 1 Corinthians 1:27).
Do you feel weak? Tired? Insignificant? Don’t be discouraged. God isn’t surprised by your weakness. In fact, that’s just the means He will use to glorify Himself in and through you.
Christmas is the holiday of weakness …
It’s God becoming man, an insignificant and vulnerable man.
It’s Jesus, King of glory, coming to join us in our weakness.
It’s the Prince of Peace coming to give us the example of a life where it’s when we’re weak that we are strong.
Thanks for existing!
