December 8, 2010

Luke’s Christmas Story
Luke 1:1-38

John, Elijah, Zechariah, Gabriel
There’s a lot more more Going on than meets the eye!
Luke 1:14-20 (NIV)

"He (John) will be a joy and delight to you . . . he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take. . . and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from birth. 16 Many of the people of Israel will he bring back to the Lord their God. 17 And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous--to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

Zechariah asked the angel, 'How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years.' 19 The angel answered, 'I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news. 20 And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their proper time.' " Luke 1:14-20 (NIV)

Pastor’s Thoughts

An elderly couple in an obscure province in the Roman Empire is told that their son will announce the coming of the Savior of the world.

The chief of all angels appears to him and it’s scary. Zechariah looses his speech and it’s because he disbelieved.

Here’s what I make of this:
1. God does always seem to be preparing the way for good things to come. I think we rarely see this. Most of the time we are too much about ourselves and we miss the big picture of how God wants to use us for some great purpose than our little myopic dreams for ourselves.

2. It doesn’t seem fair that Zechariah lost his speech just because he had trouble believing. For me I choose to think, “so what about what I think .. . who am I to make judgments about how God does things?"

3. Angels exist. Like all modern educated Americans my default thinking is not to believe in angels. But I also recognize how narrow and closed minded that default thinking of mine is. In fact when I turn off my default setting, my logic tells me that the world of God’s space is more real and varied than the one we see with our physical eyes. Our world, I think, is indeed the shadowlands, the shadow of the real world that is God’s.