Christmas Reflections

This Christmas season I was reminded of something we don't often focus on - how God purposely uses "lowly" people to shine through.  First my church did a series in December leading up to Christmas called "The Mother of God" that focused on the life of Mary, the mother of Jesus.  Most people are familiar with the nativity story and as someone who grew up going to church it's easy to overlook things and just remember a familiar story.  I learned a few things I didn't know from this series, like the fact that Joseph probably took Mary with him to Bethlehem to spare her from the gossiping since she was pregnant before they were officially married.  Also, that the part in the story where the shepherds follow the star and visit Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus would not have been a good thing - in that day shepherds were considered the lowest class of people and they were not even allowed to testify in court, so their visit would have been seen by most people of that time as something bad.  I also learned that when Joseph and Mary took Jesus to be presented in the temple after 30 days they were so poor that they had to get special permission from the priests to sacrifice a pair of doves instead of the typical lamb.

This reminded me that God does everything for a reason and every aspect of Jesus' birth was done to make a point.  In Isaiah Jesus' birth is prophesied and he is described as "...[having] no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.  He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account." (Isaiah 53: 2b-3).  God did all of this purposely because if Jesus came from a wealthy family or royalty then the common people wouldn't be able to relate to Him at all.  People would say He was who He was because of a privileged background, but He came to lift up the broken and humble the mighty.  If He came from a family that was "something" that would have been the focus not God.  One of my favorite verses is 2 Corinthians 12:9 that says "My grace is sufficient for you; my strength is made perfect in weakness."  If God used strong, powerful people to fulfill His will people might not see God in it, but when He uses weak, lowly, despised people it is obvious that something beyond that person is at work.

The second thing that reminded me of all this was an annual Christmas concert that my church hosts called "Behold the Lamb of God" which was written by Andrew Peterson.  Chad & I have gone to this concert for 6 years now and every year I'm reminded of how powerful it is.  Andrew Peterson basically decided to write a Christmas concert that really focused on Jesus.  He starts in the Old Testament and the prophecies about the Messiah who was to come and goes all the way through the birth of Jesus.  Not only is Andrew Peterson and the other musicians who join him extremely talented, but the songs and the perspective of the Christmas story is very powerful and moving.  This has become one of my favorite Christmas traditions.

So the combination of this series at church and the "Behold the Lamb of God" concert just really reiterated to me how God does everything for a reason and it's all to try to bring us to Him.  One of my friends recently posted a quote on Facebook from a Penn Jilette book that was talking about how if every religion was wiped out with no trace it would never be recreated the same again - more nonsense might be created, but not the exact same nonsense, whereas if all the scientific discoveries were wiped out science is true so it would eventually be rediscovered.  While I agree that "religion" does not always represent God well, I don't agree that anything to do with God is nonsense.  God has been revealing Himself to us since the beginning of time and He will continue to do so.  Humans tend to screw things up even with the best of intentions, but that doesn't mean that God isn't real.  There are so many layers to God that we'll never be able to comprehend with our small human minds.  But, yet He is always there showing us that He is at work in our lives and everything down to the smallest detail was done for a purpose.