We find Him in the unlikely circumstances, situations and people
For how unlikely is it that the King of the universe should be born in a stable normally reserved for animals which children’s tales tell us were the only witnesses to His arrival. How unlikely that nation which had so long awaited her Messiah should completely miss the fulfillment of her dreams and reject her only salvation.
How unlikely that this Messiah should live the great majority of His life in obscurity without the pomp and circumstance befitting Royalty, and indeed without ”form or comliness that we should desire Him”. And perhaps most of all, how unlikely that such a One should die in shame and degradation, apparently discarded upon the trashheap of history, a just another well-intentioned zealot without the means to accomplish His desired end.
This is the glory of Christmas, a glory which fills the present as well as the past. For how unlikely that the humiliated is now is now the Glorified, and the possesor of that Name at which one day all will bow. How unlikely that the Satan who apparently destroyed Him was and is the unwitting servant of the God who ”works ALL thing after His own will”. How unlikely indeed that tragedy should eternally breed triumph in the purposes of that One in whom all wisdom resides.
And perhaps most of all, how incredibly unlikely that Wisdom Herself should deign to fill the seemingly marred, broken and useless vessels that we appear to be that He might live His perfect, complete and loving life in and as us.
How unlikely and how unspeakably wonderful that in our weakness, His strength is made perfect and that He actually NEEDS us to be AS WE ARE that the glory of His Person alone might be revealed by us.
He is the God of the unlikely, the God who requires stables in which to birth His Beloved rather than the pristine palaces we might anticipate. So let us expect to find Him there, in the stables of our lives and worlds – the circumstances, situations and people where we least expect him to be.
Indeed let us see that the glory of His presence is most often in direct proportion to the appearance of His absence, and let us rejoice that Christmas above all proclaims that we have found the King of the universe in the most unlikely place of all…
”IT PLEASED GOD…TO REVEAL HIS SON IN ME”
by Glenn Davis