I’ll be back on Tuesday with answers to some of your questions and hopefully a farm story. And maybe a picture – we had the most adorable heifer calf born Thursday just before it dumped two inches of rain and a day before the wind gusted all day and the temperatures dropped to single digits…she’s barely 24 hours old and I’ve been watching her mama and her out my window as I write this newsletter, thinking about the cold stable and the baby born so long ago who was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger.
Actually, as I listened to Jay read Luke 2, I thought about how the angles never told the shepherds to go see the baby – the shepherds decided to do that on their own – and how, after they had seen Him, they “made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.”
My thought was – the shepherds made their own decision. God didn’t tell them what to do. He allowed them to make that decision on their own and they made the right one – to go see Jesus and worship him.
They didn’t stay with their sheep, they didn’t make excuses that they had to work or that it was too cold out or that they only have one day to sleep in or that church starts too early or that Mary and Joseph were hypocrites.
They got themselves up and the went to worship Jesus.
Again, God didn’t make them.
I don’t think anyone would argue that they should have stayed where they were. If they had, I’m guessing the Bible story would be a little different. Maybe it would include a different group of shepherds, or a group of cowboys, or hunters or maybe the angles would have appeared to a group of librarians meeting in Bethlehem’s social hall. I don’t know. (Imagine a nativity with librarians gathered around the manger rather than shepherds.)
I just know God wants us to leave what is comfortable – our homes – and go worship him. He doesn’t make us go – just as He did with the shepherds, He leaves that decision up to us, but maybe our story, our lives, would be different if we made that decision – to go worship Jesus. Certainly it changed the Shepherds’ lives and ours as well as we read their story.
Do we choose to go worship Jesus?
The other thing I was thinking as I listened, is that the shepherds told people.
The Bible says, “they made known abroad.”
I know about Jesus today because someone told me.
I’m not going to get to see my mom this Christmas, but I’m looking forward to seeing her in Heaven because someone told her about Jesus. I’m going to see my Aunt Jessie, Aunt June, Aunt Beulah, grandparents I’ve never met and aunts who died before I was born because someone told them about Jesus.
Which, of course, begs the question: who have YOU told about Jesus? Who knows about Jesus because of me? Who have I told? Do I care that there’s going to be a big reunion in Heaven someday and there will be people missing from that happy day because I didn’t tell them about Jesus? Because you didn’t?
It used to be the United States sent missionaries out to other countries to tell those people about Jesus.
Today, the United States is a mission field. There are kids in your town, on your street, in your local Wal-Mart, who don’t know who Jesus is. They don’t have the hope of salvation. They are lost in darkness. Bathed in the sin of the world with no idea there’s a better way.
Who is going to tell them about Jesus?
We think about Christ in the manger. We bake our cookies, wrap our gifts, sing our carols, send our cards and say Merry Christmas, but who do we tell about Jesus?
We’d rather people go to hell than take the chance of offending them.
I am SO very, very thankful that whoever told me about Jesus, whoever told my parents, my aunts, my grandparents, wanted us to be in Heaven more than they wanted to stay comfortable and “unoffensive.”
Like the shepherds who told everyone they could about the baby they saw, they had news to share – good new, the very BEST news ever – and they shared it so I could accept Christ’s free gift of salvation.
As we listen to the Christmas story, and as we think about the amazing love of God, the miracle of the virgin birth and the humbleness of the lowly stable, let’s think about the shepherds, too, and how they didn’t keep what they knew to themselves, but told as many people as they could the very best news the earth had ever known – Jesus Christ, Savior of the world, was born to die, so we might live.
How can we possibly keep news like that to ourselves? Look at the humble shepherds’ example and tell people about Jesus.
Warm hugs and a beautiful and merry Christmas to you all!
~Jessie ❤️