Devotional for the week of Dec. 17

Choose someone to light the first candle from two weeks ago.
Choose someone to light second candle from last week.
Choose someone to light the third (purple) candle for this week.

Scripture Reading: Luke 2: 1—20.

Devotional:

We have streetlights. Every house has electricity. We have plenty of businesses open. Cars drive using headlights. It doesn’t really get dark in our city, even at night.

In the winter of 4 or 5 B.C. on a hillside near Bethlehem it was seriously dark. No streetlights. No electricity. No businesses open. No cars. Maybe a campfire here or there, but that’s pretty much it.

And a group of young men were still awake, doing their job. They’d been busy all day tending the sheep. Keeping the snakes away. Making sure predators didn’t devour their animals. Keeping thieves from taking them. Being a shepherd required the same diligence during the night time.

Then a blinding light. The kind of light only an angel of the Lord can bring. The kind of light that makes you fall on your face and cover up to keep your eyes from hurting.

Then a voice tells you not to be afraid. And not only that, but then the angel tells you the best news anybody has heard for some 400 years: The Messiah has been born. You can go see Him. He’s about two miles away, in a feeding trough.

Nothing else is important. The snakes, the predators, the thieves, the sheep. Just get there. See the Messiah. Run. Faster. The kind of adrenaline rush that makes your heartbeat pound in your ears. Just get there. See the Messiah. That’s all that really matters.

The teenagers burst in on another teenager. Now she’s a mom. The father’s there, too. They see the baby. Yep, right there in the feeding trough. They tell the new parents the story of what happened on that hillside. An angel. The Messiah. That’s why we’re here.

Mom treasures these things in her heart. It’s been an interesting 9 months to say the least.

And the shepherds go back, praising God for what they saw that night outside Bethlehem and seeing the fulfillment of prophecy. They’ve seen first-hand that God is at work in their history…and that reality is life-changing. Everything in their life has changed because they’ve seen the Messiah. God is at work. The Messiah is alive, and I’ve seen Him. And that changes everything. It will be an interesting 33 years, to say the least.