Monday, December 27

All:

Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood by George MacDonald is about a young pastor as he takes on his first church in a rural town in England.  The story follows his relationships and his attempts at shepherding this community.  In it, the main character explains:

“I told my people that God had created all our worships, reverences, tendernesses, loves.  That they had come out of His heart and were put into us because they were in Him first.  That all we could imagine of the wise, the lovely, the beautiful, was in Him, only infinitely more than we could imagine or understand.  That in Him was all the wise teaching of the best man and more; all the grace, gentleness, and truth of the best child and more; all the tenderness and devotion of the truest woman and more.  Therefore, we must be all God’s and all our aspirations, all our worships, all our honors, all our loves, must center in Him.”

It is Him who’s birth we celebrated last week.  It is Him who took on flesh and came to dwell among us.  It is him who so tenderly and with such compassion met prostitutes, and lepers, and invalids, and tax collectors, and sinners and offered them forgiveness and freedom and peace.  It is Him who endured such torture and pain and the worst of all deaths on our behalf.  And it is Him who resurrected from the dead and gives us a mighty and true hope of a future resurrection and restoration of all things.  It is Him who’s birth changes everything for us.

Read what the Apostle Paul wrote of Him:

15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. - Colossians 1.15-20

He who exists of his own accord, who is eternal, who is before all things and in whom all things hold together, enters our world to serve and to sacrifice. 

And I wonder do we offer Him our all? 

Do we find our all in Him? 

Are we all GOD’s; and are all our aspirations, all our worships, all our honors, all our loves centered on Him?

- Ken Lippold