The Six Days of Christmas (Day 6) Not in that Poor lowly Stable

 

Photo by Lynda Hinton on Unsplash

On this Christmas morning we come to the last verse of "Once in Royal David's City:"

Not in that poor lowly stable

with the oxen standing by,

we shall see him, but in heaven,

sat at God's right hand on high;

there his children gather round

bright like stars, with glory crowned.

Have You Noticed?

Perhaps you've noticed that Covid hasn't played a part in these six Christmas blogs. That's not because we are insensitive to the impact Covid has had upon all of us, but to provide some kind of balance: Covid is not the most important news in the world today.

Towering above the pandemic in importance is the Good News that God is building his eternal kingdom in this world and nothing at all can divert or hinder him from that task. 

 

The biggest news, ever and always, is God's glorious Kingdom which he is building moment by moment in his people and through his people, both individually, and collectively as local churches.

Covid is small fry by comparison.

 

The Return of the King

 

At the end of God's great Kingdom building Project in this present world God's King will be seen in all his glory and acknowledged by everyone.

When Jesus returns, it will not be in "that poor lowly stable with the oxen standing by "but in power and glory "sat at God's right hand on high."

 

It is right to remind ourselves on this Christmas Morn that the day is approaching when Jesus Christ will come into the world once more, but very differently from his first arrival.

 

He was born in obscurity - when he returns "every eye will see him." (Revelation 1:7)

 

He was born in weakness - when he returns he will come "in clouds with great power and glory." (Mark 13:26)

When he came the first time, he was judged, sentenced and crucified - when he returns he will judge the world, for "he will sit on his glorious throne. The people of every nation will be gathered in front of him." (Matthew 25:31)

 

The End and the Beginning

 

The sudden return of Jesus will signal the end of this present passing age, but it will also signal the beginning of a new age, the final age, the "eternal state" as some Christians teachers have put it.

 

All the dead will be raised to life, some to eternal damnation, some to eternal life. If we have repented of our sins and if we believe in Jesus Christ we will be among those who enjoy eternal life with God's people in a renewed heavens and a renewed earth.

 

Over this new cosmos Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace will rule in righteousness and justice and we will serve him forever.

What will we be doing? Not floating around the stars flapping our wings, for sure. We know we will worship God, but heaven will not be an eternal worship service. We have every good reason to expect the new heavens and the new earth to be like this world but much much better. 

 

We know there will be no sorrow, death, mourning or tears. 

 

We know we will be filled with joy in God's presence.

One Christian friend who spent a lot of time in Africa expects there to be elephants and giraffes in heaven. Why not? All of God's creatures bring him glory.

We know that somehow and in some way the Lord Jesus Christ will be the centre of attention, "The Lamb is all the glory in Immanuel's land."

We know this because in Revelation John sees "a Lamb looking as if it had been slain, standing in the centre of the throne" (5:6) and he hears "every creature in heaven and on earth...singing... 'To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.'" (5:13)

 

Exactly what this means, precisely how Jesus will be the centre of attention, we cannot say. 

But significantly, the only one who will bear the marks of this fallen world will be the Lord Jesus Christ. Our bodies will be raised without a blemish, but not his. He will bear the marks of crucifixion on his body for all eternity.

And in this way the redeeming love of God revealed supremely through the sacrificial death of his Son will be  remembered for ever and ever. We will never grow tired of hearing the account of Jesus' death on behalf of unworthy sinners. 

 

In all our Christmas happenings may the Lord keep our eyes on this our glorious future.

A Prayer for the Day

Our loving and gracious Father in heaven,

We thank you for every good gift that marks these strange days, including the opportunity to spend time with those nearest and dearest to us.

 

We pray that in the midst of it all we may remember that this world is not our home, that we are just passing through and that our treasures are laid up some where beyond the blue.

 

Teach us to set our affections on things above where Christ sits at the right hand of God.

We ask these things in Jesus' Name

Amen

 

The Six Days of Christmas (Day 5) And our Eyes at last Shall see Him

 

Photo by Lynda Hinton on Unsplash

 

The fifth verse of our wonderful carol reads like this:

 

And our eyes at last shall see Him
Through His own redeeming love
For that child, so dear and gentle
Is our Lord in heaven above
And He leads His children along
To the place where He is gone

 

 The Visio Beatifica

 

Christians with mystical leanings - not at all to be despised - talk about the moment they will see Jesus face to face. And they call this moment in Latin, the "Visio Beatifica" or in English "The Beatific Vision."

 

The idea may be at first seem more romantic than Biblical, but there are Scriptures that point in this direction. 1 John 3:2 reads:

"Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is."

 

John does not mention a mystical experience per se, but seeing Jesus does, in some way, transform us into his likeness.

 

Closer to the mark is what Paul writes in 2 Thessalonians 1. On the day Jesus returns he will...

 

"...be glorified in his holy people and marvelled at among all those who have believed." 

 

Jesus Christ will shine through his people ("will be glorified in his holy people") in their new resurrection bodies. And they will marvel at him, be amazed by him, gaze in wonder at him.

Then there is chapter 1 of the book of Revelation. The apostle John is wrapped up in an ecstatic vision of Jesus Christ. If this remarkable and glorious vision of Jesus is what all of God's people experience the moment we reach heaven, then I'm not sure that the poetic language of The Beatific Vision or Visio Beatifica even begins to capture the wonder we will one day experience when we see Jesus face to face.

 

For sure our carol writer has got it right, "And our eyes at last shall see him."  One day faith will give way to sight and hope will give way to reality.

 

And when we talk about seeing someone's face, we mean knowing them better, for with our faces we express the content of our hearts.

But there will be no Queue!

A young Christian caught up in the excitement of heaven suggested to his older Christian brothers and sisters that he would not be interested in talking to them in the world to come because he'd head straight for the long queue in front of the throne of Jesus. 

It was a touching expression of devotion but it missed a vital aspect of heaven's glory. 

 

For, in that world of light, God's perfected people will become like Jesus "we shall be like him" says John (1 John 3:2) so that as we have fellowship with God's sanctified people in heaven who will perfectly reflect the Saviour's glory, we will at the very same experience be having fellowship with Jesus Christ whose very likeness we will see in them.

 

Cecily Francis Alexander, the author of our Carol, was right to draw our attention to the last chapter of God's great salvation story. The story of the birth of Jesus has a glorious ending without which it is incomplete.

 

That ending is dwelling of God with his people forever.

A PRAYER FOR THE DAY

 

Our loving Father,

It is only through your redeeming grace that we will one day see the face of God. We are sinners who deserve your wrath rather than your favour, so we thank you for your amazing grace.

Forgive our sins and help us to repent of them all, for only the pure in heart can see God.

 

And help us to look forward to the day when we will see Jesus face to face.

We ask this in Jesus' name,

 

Amen

The Six Days of Christmas (Day 4) Tears and Smiles like us he knew

 

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The God who Empathises with Us

For he is our childhood's pattern: 

day by day like us he grew, 

he was little, weak and helpless,

tears and smiles like us he knew;

and he feeleth for our sadness,

and he shareth in our gladness.

One of the reasons God allows church leaders to suffer is to reveal to them the afflictions of ordinary folks in their congregations.

Not just leaders are called to the ministry of sufferering.

All believers are called into the great task of comforting others with the comfort with which they have been comforted.

We pass through a bereavement, for example, and all of a sudden find our hearts torn when someone else we know is passing through the self-same trial.

A soft and tender heart is what the Lord wants of us all. And it can only be gotten from the Holy Spirit through the valley of suffering.

Tested in Every Way 

I have often pondered those striking words about Jesus found in Hebrews, that he was "tested in every way, just as we are, yet without sin." (Hebrews 4:15) The notable feature is "every way;" Jesus passed through all the tests that we do. That includes the very one we are passing through today.

So often we can feel that our trials are unique to us. We see no-one around us fighting the same battle. We know of no-one struggling in the same way. We have not read of anyone in history who endured the same trial. 

And to some extent this is true - our trials have a uniqueness about them. No two people experience the same bereavement in the same way; no two people face  cancer in the same way, and so on.

But there is something in common with every kind of trial, a common core which all sufferers share. And we are never "the only one" to be suffering that common core, for Scripture reminds us that "no temptation (test) has overtaken you except what is common to mankind." (1 Corinthians 10:13). 

That in itself is a comfort - other Christians are passing through the same trials. But the highest comfort we can possess is that Jesus Christ, our great High Priest, has been tested in every way that we have been, and heaven now has a sympathiser sitting on the right hand of God, who "feeleth for our sadness and shareth in our gladness."

 A Man in Heaven Today

It's easy to forget that the Man Christ Jesus now sits on God's throne on high. A man with a resurrected human body. A Man who has experienced the sorrows of our lives. A Man who understands. A High Priest who is able to sympathise with us. When he hears our prayers he hears them as an "insider" and his Spirit within us is able to take even our unintelligible gobbledygook words and make their deep meaning comprehensible to the sympathising Jesus.

The Great Physician now is near,
  The sympathizing Jesus;
He speaks the drooping heart to cheer,
  Oh, hear the voice of Jesus! 

 

Sweetest note in seraph song; 

Sweetest name on mortal tongue;

Sweetest carol ever sung:

    Jesus, blessed Jesus!

A Prayer for the Day

Our Father in heaven,

We thank you that in your great wisdom, you planned salvation around your Son. We thank you that you sent him into the world to live our life, share in our joys and suffer our sorrows.

We thank you that heaven understands the heartaches of this broken world and we thank you that we have a sympathising ear in heaven.

Help us to come boldly to you in our time of need, knowing that this is true.

We ask this in the name of our Great High Priest,

Amen

The Six Days of Christmas (Day 3) Through all his wondrous Childhood

 

 Photo by Lynda Hinton on Unsplash

 

In our travels through the carol, "Once in Royal David's City" we've arrived at verse 3:

 

And through all his wondrous childhood
he would honour and obey,
love and watch the gentle mother
in whose tender arms he lay:
Christian children all should be
kind, obedient, good as he.

 

 Jesus was a normal kid 

This blog is mainly for the kids - perhaps parents would like to read it with their children. 

 

Cecil, the author of the Carol, reminds us that Jesus grew up the way we all grow up, he passed through all the stages of life that we do. Babyhood, toddlerhood, childhood, adolescence, youth, adulthood but not middle age or old age. We all know why.

 

In the first part of his life Jesus had to learn how to obey his parents. I shall call them his mom and dad even though we know that his coming into the world was a little different from ours. Whatever those details, Jesus had to live in a house with two grown-ups he called mother and father. 

We read that Jesus was obedient to Mary and Joseph (Luke 2:51), and all Christian children should follow his example and "honour and obey" their mothers and fathers too.

Jesus also had to learn how to get on with brothers and sisters. He was the oldest child which probably meant that his parents had been stricter on him than the rest because they were learning how to be  parents and didn't want to get it wrong. That sometimes happens. 

 

His parents would have expected him to set an example to his younger brothers and sisters, because he had more experience than they did.

 

Christian children all should be

Kind, obedient, good as he.

Jesus was different

 

"Ah" but some bright spark will say, "Jesus was God and this helped him to obey his mother and father." Or perhaps, "Jesus was sinless and perfect, he had no sinful nature like me, that's why he could obey his mother and father, but why I can't."

It's true that Jesus did have a divine nature, but that nature never stepped in to support or empower his human nature. Otherwise Jesus could not be called a real human being like us. If every time a brother or sister taunted him, Jesus called on his divine nature to help him deal with it, Jesus could not be called a human like us.

It's true that Jesus did not have a sinful human nature like we do. But that did not stop Satan from whispering terrible suggestions into his ears, which he had to resist.

 

Jesus' real humanity means that like every Christian child he had to work on obedience, asking his Father for help and relying on the Holy Spirit's power.

So we can't use the divinity of Jesus or his sinlessness to justify our slips and mistakes can we?

If we believe in the Lord Jesus, we have the power of his Holy Spirit in our hearts, just as Jesus did, and if we pray for God's help we can obey mom and dad and we can learn to get on with our brothers and sisters.

Off from school this Christmas time and spending so much time with our families, getting on is even more important than normal. Let's remember that loving and agreeable relationships with everyone pleases and honours the Lord who first loved us.

A PRAYER FOR THE DAY

 

Our Father in heaven,

 

We would love to have spent a day in the Joseph and Mary household. There we would have seen all the ordinary struggles we see in every home in every country of the world. 

 

But we would also have seen the quiet example of the oldest boy, who empowered by the Holy Spirit, respected mom and dad and got on with his brothers and sisters.

 

Help us to be kind, obedient and good as he. With your help.

 

We ask these things for your glory and for our good.

 

Amen 

The Six Days of Christmas (Day 2) He came down to earth from heaven

 

   Photo by Lynda Hinton on Unsplash

 

Of a virgin for a reason

 

The next verse of our Christmas Carol runs like this:

 

He came down to earth from heaven

who is God and Lord of all;

and his shelter was a stable

and his cradle was a stall:

with the poor and mean and lowly

lived on earth our Saviour holy.

 

The Scriptures are adament and persistent: The Son of God came down from heaven, Jesus Christ was supernaturally conceived without the help of a husband. 

 

The Scriptures may even be saying that he was conceived without the help of a woman's DNA, because we read that the "holy one to be born will be called the Son of God" and more tellingly, "what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit."

We know that Jesus inherited no DNA from Joseph, and we have no idea if he inherited DNA from his mother. He may not have. He was called Joseph's son (John 6:42), though Joseph was not his biological father. And it could be that Jesus was called Mary's son without sharing her DNA. We do not know.

The reason Jesus' conception was wholly supernatural was to protect him from sin inherited from human parents. If Jesus did share some of Mary's DNA, it would have had to be sanctified to preserve Jesus from possessing a fallen nature.

The truth is that we don't know exactly what happened in that womb, except for these two things: Jesus did not inherit a sinful nature from Mary, but on the other hand he was a human being like us in every way, except for sin. 

 

Paul goes as far as it is possible to go when he says that the Son of God came "in the likeness of sinful flesh" (Romans 8:3). He cannot mean that Jesus had a sinful nature, perish the thought. But he wants us to know that Jesus was a real man like you and I.

 

The supernatural conception of Jesus protected the Son of God from the effects of Adam's fall, while his birth ensured that he was a real man. Rather than sending a pre-made baby into the world from heaven, God "abhors not the Virgin's womb." The Son of God must pass through all the stages of human devlopment the rest of us do.

 

The God-man mediator 

And so the Son of God became what he was not (a man) but continued to be what he always was (God).

 

Why?

So that he could be the perfect mediator between the two parties at war - God and man.

And so that God could understand and empathise with frail creatures of dust, "the poor and mean and lowly."

Prayer for the Day

Our loving Father in heaven,

We acknowledge your Son as Lord and God, the holy One who came down from heaven. We thank you that through his work as the perfect God-man mediator, he was able to pay the price for all our sins.

We thank you that a real man sits in the throne room of heaven and understands us in our frail humanity. 

Teach us to love and trust him more.

We ask these things in His Name

Amen.