It Starts in a Manger
When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.” So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.
Luke 2:15-16 (NIV)
This passage teaches us that we must pay attention to what God lets emerge from the ordinary in our lives.
The prophets of ancient times said that the child who would be born as Messiah would be:
- Our king forever, reigning on David’s throne
- Wonderful Counselor
- Mighty God
- Eternal Father
- And the government shall rest upon His shoulders!
If you are looking for a man under that description, you don’t go looking in mangers, right?
Jesus shows up in the most ordinary way we might imagine. He shows up in a manger. The shepherds arrive at the manger, and there is Jesus wrapped in cloth—so ordinary that it ought to teach you that you cannot ignore what God is letting emerge from the ordinary in your life.
God lets power emerge from ordinary people, ordinary places, ordinary things, movements, and encounters. Do you know how much God wants to use your ordinary life to reveal Him, to announce Him, to extend Him, to prove Him, to praise Him, to celebrate Him, to adore Him, to testify about Him? Stop counting yourself out!
Stop chasing the extraordinary, the cataclysmic, and the monumental, and learn how to nurture the intimacy of your relationship with God based on the ordinary things. Give attention to what God is letting emerge from the ordinary in life, but additionally accept that maybe life is not about climbing, but descending. Jesus starts His earthly life in a manger and then descends to a grave.
Jesus spends His earthly ministry emptying Himself, becoming as all humans are. He who knew no sin yet was tempted in every way just like we are, He submits to and obeys God. Hebrews 4:15 says that we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but we have a high priest who was like us in every way; He experienced every temptation and never sinned. This is why Jesus teaches that if we want to follow Him, we have to give up our lives.
God can use the ordinary to do extraordinary things.
The Blessing of Inconvenience
In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.
Luke 2:1-7 (NIV)
There may be times in your life when you’ve said to the Lord: God, You can’t expect me to show up and be great right now. You can’t expect me to offer a smile with the hurt that I’m feeling underneath the surface. Are You really asking me to show up and give energy when I feel so depleted with all that I’m carrying and the pain that I’m tending and the way I’ve been disregarded? You want me to deliver for you right now?
Mary teaches us that God’s stirring in our lives is always a revelation of right timing, even when it’s the “wrong” time. Even if the time may be inconvenient to you and unsettling for you, remember it is always subject to God’s sovereign authority.
If God is poking you, moving you, stirring you, agitating you, allowing pain, and producing labor, then part of nurturing faith is to accept the inconvenience of it all and understand it as a blessing.
Mary had every right to question God’s timing, to question God’s placement after already having reconciled her womb being surrendered to God and her human love interest being put at risk. The inconvenience Mary experienced happens to us as well, and we can get really frustrated if we don’t carry spiritual discernment about it.
In your life, when things are unfolding strangely and when you’re forced to show up in uncomfortable and inconvenient spaces, when you have awkward encounters with people, when you have to perform, when you are far away from normalcy, just keep reminding yourself that God is doing this other thing that doesn’t need your agreement or your convenience: God is doing this other thing that needs your obedience. You honor Him by fighting to be great for Him—even when you’re being severely inconvenienced.
Stop treating the stuff that’s happening to you as if God doesn’t love you or that God is mad at you. Recognize that there are times when God is doing other things and your inconvenience is simply a part of it.
Better at Dealing with Shame
For in Scripture it says: “See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.”
1 Peter 2:6 (NIV)
Salvation erases human shame and gives a believer a sense of self-pride, gratitude, thanksgiving, and a deep appreciation for the uniqueness of one’s life. Jesus steps into this kind of honor-and-shame cultural context and says, if you ask Me who I’m going to have dinner with, I’m not going to the palace to have dinner with the king. I’m going to eat with lepers and sinners and go to a party with tax collectors.
Why? Because it represents a powerful truth: there is no shame necessary when one has anchored one's faith in Jesus Christ.
Do you know how many people have denied themselves the opportunity to take advantage of a chance and an open door because they woke up this morning feeling like a human reproach? Peter says to cut that shame out and understand that when you belong to Jesus, you can live better than shame. If you have assurance in Christ, you can actually rebuke shame.
Shame is going to always be walking beside you, whispering things like:
- But you know you’re divorced.
- But you know you had kids before you got married.
- But you know they didn’t hire you.
- But you know you’ve gained all that weight.
- But you know everybody knows your mistakes.
- But you know you’ve spent that time in prison.
- But you know you had to go through rehab three times.
- But you know you failed the bar four times.
You can’t stop shame from walking beside you and saying such things, but in Christ He gives you the capacity to push back. You can fight back against shame when it keeps playing that same recording of what feeds your shame. Push back on it and say: “You’re right; those things are true, but I’ve got a cornerstone, and because of that, the fragility of the rest of the structure of my life is not built on how strong my peripherals are. It is built on how stable my cornerstone is. I can be wounded and still anointed because the cornerstone is keeping me together. I don’t have to live led by shame. In fact, I have Christ’s permission to dismiss it, to fight it, and to rebuke it.”
Your shame is never bigger than Jesus’ forgiveness. Your shame can never diminish His grace.
Better at Setting Something Aside
“And now let Pharaoh look for a discerning and wise man and put him in charge of the land of Egypt. Let Pharaoh appoint commissioners over the land to take a fifth of the harvest of Egypt during the seven years of abundance. They should collect all the food of these good years that are coming and store up the grain under the authority of Pharaoh, to be kept in the cities for food.”
Genesis 41:33-35 (NIV)
Can you accept that you possess the discipline to save some of your money? God has given us this discipline as a way of living obediently to Him, of honoring His omniscience, and of showing gratitude that in many instances He will not let us be caught off guard. He will provide both revelation and vision: revelation to tell you what’s coming and vision to tell you how to respond to it.
God gives Pharaoh a dream that when Joseph interprets it, it reveals that God blesses the saving and the storing just as much as His blessings are revealed in surviving the famine.
We become better at saving money first when we develop the conviction that saving and storing is just as much a spiritual offering to God as it is scattering, planting, harvesting, and storing. Saving money is as much a blessing as being able to spend it. Worship can be attached to the saving of money just as intimately as the worship we offer over what our money brings to our lives.
If you can thank God when God lets it flow in the years of plenty, you can thank God when you have to live in the years of scarcity off of what you have stored.
Look at your paycheck and assess: if you have to put $10 to the side, do you see the opportunity to celebrate? Money saved equal to the clothes and jewelry and cars and possessions that money purchases turns into opportunities to be grateful for God’s provision.
For far too many people, saving is a burden. That’s why most people avoid it or do it reluctantly. Whatever one’s attitude toward a thing often determines their commitment toward that thing, which means we could all do better at saving money if we first changed our perception of the discipline of saving and storing. Saving money is an act of spiritual offering to God. You honor God not just by how you spend your money; you honor God by how you save your money.
Say to yourself: “If I learn how to save money, I can thank God in the years of plenty for how good God has been, and thank God in the years of scarcity for how He keeps me from falling and presents me faultless.” Become better at saving your money because it builds and strengthens other disciplines. Start wherever you are, with whatever you have, whenever you can, as much as you can.
Better at Creating a New Normal
On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”
John 20:19-23 (NIV)
When life drags you through some of these sinking moments and deeply painful experiences, when fatigue seems to have squeezed out the little optimism and hope you had left, when your reserve tank has now run out of fuel and the stall has given way to a complete stop, you may feel you can’t move forward anymore, you can’t find any more reason to stay positive.
You may say to yourself, “I don’t know how to process this, and if I could, I wouldn’t know where to house these thoughts and emotions because they’re too tough, too painful, too confusing, too fatiguing, too draining, and too disappointing.”
The first thing we must notice in this text is that Jesus appeared in His resurrected body. The writer thinks it is instructive to remind us that Jesus appears in a locked space in His resurrected body to the timid and fearful disciples, saying “Peace be with you.”
The lesson is to grab the important blessing of His appearance in that resurrected body and to define your own peace by it. Jesus is teaching and inviting us to consider that resurrection is not to be seen or embraced as a one-time event. Resurrection was the release of a spiritual norm.
You live with resurrection capacity.
All of us have areas of our lives that have experienced death. And here’s what He’s saying: Everything in your life that has ceased to be as God designed can be resurrected to fresh participation in the ongoing movement of creation in your particular context.
His appearance was not just a demonstration or confirmation. It was an invitation. What’s the invitation? Here it is:
Child of God, you are invited to move in your life from evidence of belief in Jesus to belief as an expansive norm. How expansive? So deep, so wide, so applicable, so necessary, so relevant, so needed, that there is no part of your life that you will just accept as okay, outside of the design of God’s will for it. Meaning, you don’t care what has experienced death in your life; you don’t settle for it. Whatever it is, relationship, ambition, dream, or vision. You don’t accept that which seems insurmountable at any cost because God has given you resurrection capacity.
