Emmanuel: Christmas Series Part 6
“O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.” (Translated from Latin to English by John M. Neale, 1851.)
Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us. Matthew 1:23, KJV
God came to earth in the form of a baby. Human flesh—tender, baby, crying, kicking, gurgling, cooing flesh—cloaked the Ancient of Days.
God came to earth. He was Emmanuel—God with us. He joined the race of man in the same manner that the rest of us did—He was born.
His primary purpose was to become a ransom for His people Israel, and then through that one sacrificial payment, to redeem the rest of the human race as well.
Neither animal sacrifice nor good works was enough to open Heaven’s door to humanity. Sin had permeated our beings; we lived our allotted time on earth in the lonely exile of sin. And then? The Son of God was born. Rejoice, rejoice! God is with us.
“O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan’s tyranny;
From depths of hell Thy people save,
And give them victory over the grave.”
The Messiah was to come through the lineage of David, son of Jesse. From that kingly heritage would be birthed the One who would bring an end to the devil’s tyranny over mankind. He would save God’s people from hell and even grant them victory over the grave. Tall order for a newborn babe. Yet within that infant in swaddling clothes lay the future conquest over Satan—the one who currently held the keys to death and hell. At the right time, this Boy would step into the Manhood and ministry that would forever change the world.
“O come, Desire of nations, bind
In one the hearts of all mankind;
Bid Thou our sad divisions cease,
And be Thyself our King of Peace.”
The planet has long been fractured and splintered into divisive groups. It seems like the more we celebrate diversity in an attempt to affirm and unify, the further apart we grow. Man’s tinkering, it appears, has only served to stir up already-agitated waters, exposing our species’ innate inability to solve such deeply-rooted issues.
Not so with the One called the Desire of nations (see Haggai 2:7, KJV). He came to create one heart, one mind, and one body through the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Ghost (see Titus 3:5). He came to break down the barrier walls between us—in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise” (Galatians 3:28-29).
Those of us who have been born from above through faith in the Child of Bethlehem—all grown up, crucified, and risen from the grave—are one body, wherever we dwell on the earth and in whatever portion of history we occupy.
If you are born again, you are my brother or my sister. We are family, even if we don’t always see eye to eye. We have a bond that runs more deeply than human DNA, a bond forged in the redemptive shed blood of Jesus.
Emmanuel—God with us—came to the earth and redeemed for Himself anyone and everyone who would believe in Him. And to them He gave the privilege to become the sons and daughters of God.
Rejoice! God is with us!
Dorothy
© 2015, Dorothy Frick
Tomorrow: The government
Read MoreJoseph: Christmas Series Part 5
Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows: when His mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit. And Joseph her husband, being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her, planned to send her away secretly. Matthew 1:18-19
Joseph the carpenter was a righteous man. He had recently asked for Mary’s hand in marriage and they were anticipating their wedding day. However, something terrible became known to him—she, the desire of his heart—was pregnant though he had never touched her. He must have wrestled with this news; outrage, suspicion, horror, and unbearable hurt surely collided within his heart and overwhelmed him. Finally, that godly man made up his mind: not wanting to disgrace her, he developed a plan to send her away secretly.
Joseph was not only a righteous man, but he was a kind man as well. He knew the Law; according to it, Mary must be stoned for committing adultery. However, he could not bear the disgrace and terror of agony that would befall her; therefore, he made a plan to send her away before anyone noticed her swelling belly.
Such was the man whom God chose to raise His Son—he was a man of faith and a man of compassion.
After hearing the heartbreaking news of Mary’s unwed pregnancy, the gears must have been turning in Joseph’s mind as he developed a plan to send her out of town as soon as possible. It likely happened that very night, as he tossed and turned in fretful sleep, that he received the plan for “Operation Mary”—an entirely unexpected, miraculously impossible, nearly unbelievable plan straight from the realm of glory.
But when he had considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife; for the Child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit…” Matthew 1:20
The angel of the Lord called him by name and told him not to be afraid. Then the plan unfolded: he was to marry this young woman; the Child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit.
She will bear a Son; and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins. Matthew 1:21
She would have a boy and Joseph was to name Him Jesus. This baby would not only grow up in Joseph’s home and be raised as his son, but one day this Child would also save God’s people—and Joseph himself—from their sins.
And Joseph awoke from his sleep and did as the angel of the Lord commanded him, and took Mary as his wife, but kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a Son; and he called His name Jesus. Matthew 1:24-25
Joseph, the righteous man and Joseph the compassionate man received the plan from God. He took Mary as his wife and kept her a virgin until the birth of her Son. And he named the boy Jesus according to plan.
Mary was the instrument of God through whom the Messiah entered the earth, yet she was not left to fulfill this magnificent plan alone. Although her faith in God was unshakable, that which had happened to her was beyond far-fetched, and because of that, Joseph had fully intended to secretly send her away to let her start a new life on her own far from the judging suspicions of the townspeople.
But God had another plan, and He was entirely capable of making it known to Joseph, whom He had chosen just as He had chosen Mary. And through their faith and obedience, the Messiah grew up in a loving, righteous home.
Has God put a dream or desire in your heart that appears nearly impossible to fulfill? Do you feel alone in the vision He has planted within you? Take courage from the story of Mary and Joseph; when God purposes to accomplish a specific task through your life, He will speak to whomever He must—just as He did with Joseph—to see to it that His plan unfolds at just the right time.
Allow your faith in the miraculous ability of God to grow and be buoyed up within you as you consider the lives of the couple whom God chose to raise the Messiah. Does your situation look laughable? Impossible? Beyond the reach of human help or reason? Then you are just the candidate for whom God can unfold His plan—in accordance with His Word and complete with signs, wonders, behind-the-scene workings, and sweetly surprising coincidences of glory.
And yes, just like He did for Mary, God will speak to whomever He must in order to accomplish His plan in your life. In the meantime, what is your job? It is to declare as Mary did in the face of God’s impossible plan, “May it be done to me according to Your Word.”
And then, like Joseph, as you forsake neither righteousness nor kindness, simply listen to Him in your heart and obey.
Dorothy
I know that You can do all things, and that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted. Job 42:2
© 2015, Dorothy Frick
Tomorrow: Emmanuel—God with us
Read MoreAccording to Your Word: Christmas Series Part 4
And Mary said, “Behold, the bondslave of the Lord; may it be done to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her. Luke 1:38
When you think about it, Mary was a radical believer. She humbly submitted herself to the will of God even when doing so could bring her untold hardship and shame. A virgin with child? Absolutely preposterous. Scandalous. Shameful.
She embraced the impossible, knowing that with God, nothing is impossible. Think about her life; she was recently engaged to the godly carpenter Joseph, and this new predicament would surely bring shame to him as well. Would he understand? Would anyone understand?
“May it be done to me according to your word,” she said, despite the nearly certain outcry of ridicule and suspicion to follow.
You may be facing a crossroad in your life. Perhaps the Lord is directing you down an unbeaten path. Maybe He is prompting you to take a stand that is unpopular with your peers. One of the messages of Christmas is plain and direct: “Lord, I am Your bondslave. May it be done to me according to Your Word.”
Yes, the story of Christmas is tender, warm, and mild. But within it—in the courageous spirit of the sweet young virgin—is a bold, fierce passion for the plan and will of God—a passion that does not cower at the consequences or cost.
Think about that as you see the young mother in nativity scenes and on Christmas cards this season. Her humble willingness to lose everything—her reputation, her husband-to-be, and perhaps even her life—to gain the will and approval of God speaks indelibly amidst the hubbub of the season.
May God grant you not only the joy of Christmas, but also a fierce, bold passion that says to God in the face of impossibilities, “Behold, the bondslave of the Lord; may it be done to me according to Your Word.”
Dorothy
© 2015, Dorothy Frick
Tomorrow: Joseph
Read MoreThe forerunner: Christmas Series Part 3
“The angel said to him, ‘Do not be afraid, Zacharias, for your petition has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will give him the name John…” Luke 1:13
You won’t see this scene on any of your Christmas cards or in the glitzy commercial holiday world, but this subplot is an essential part of the Christmas story.
“And he [John] will turn many of the sons of Israel back to the Lord their God. It is he who will go as a forerunner before Him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children, and the disobedient to the attitude of the righteous, so as to make ready a people prepared for the Lord’’’ (Luke 1:16-17).
God prepared a forerunner—someone who would move in the spirit and power of the Old Testament prophet Elijah; someone who would step into the ministry of reconciliation; someone who would prepare the way of the Lord. The plan of God was to redeem not only Israel but also the entire world. To do so, this important preparatory component needed to play out just before the birth of the Messiah.
John the Baptist was that forerunner, and his conception and birth were attended by the miraculous. First, an angel appeared to his father Zacharias, announcing God’s plan to use this yet-to-be-conceived child to prepare the way of the Messiah. Second, his wife Elizabeth was past the age of childbearing and had been barren all her life, yet she would bear for Zacharias this amazing forerunner. Then when Zacharias asked the angel, “How will I know this for certain? For I am an old man and my wife is advanced in years” (see Luke 1:18), he became mute, unable to speak until the things the angel told him took place.
Elizabeth conceived soon thereafter. When the time arrived for the baby to be named, Elizabeth instructed those present that his name was John. Determined to name him after his father, they attempted to pressure Elizabeth to conform with convention until Zacharias—still mute—stepped in and wrote on a tablet, “His name is John” (see Luke 1:24, 59-63). “And at once his mouth was opened and his tongue loosed, and he began to speak in praise of God” (Luke 1:64). It all happened just as the angel had predicted.
Perhaps one of the most astounding wonders of all surrounding John in those early days was what happened when Elizabeth was in her sixth month of pregnancy. The virgin Mary, newly pregnant, traveled to the hill country of Judah to visit her aging cousin. The moment Mary greeted her upon arrival, Elizabeth exclaimed, “…how has it happened to me, that the mother of my Lord would come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby leaped in my womb for joy” (Luke1:43-44). The Holy Spirit so overwhelmed the unborn forerunner that his mother could feel him rejoicing within her.
Two godly women—one a virgin bearing the Messiah, and the other, after lifelong barrenness, now pregnant in her old age with His forerunner—carried within them the plan and purpose of God for the ages. Things played out relatively quietly for the two women, humanly speaking, but they found themselves in the center of the supernatural workings of Heaven.
John would grow up to be a prophet, living in the wilderness, preaching repentance, baptizing, and proclaiming, “Make ready the way of the Lord” (see Luke 3:4), and he would even baptize Jesus just before the Lord entered His three-year ministry. Later Jesus would say of John, “I say to you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John; yet he who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he” (Luke 7:28).
Jesus, the baby of the young virgin, would grow up to teach, preach, cast out demons, heal the sick, and raise the dead. Although He was utterly non-political, He would be viewed as a revolutionary. His purpose was to revolutionize the hearts of men and women and to make them citizens of the kingdom of God. His greatest work, however, was in His death—He was arrested as an agitator, lawbreaker, a fraud, and a proclaimer of Fake News. He was sentenced, beaten, stripped, and nailed to a cross. He died, spilling His blood—as a ransom for you and for me.
Of this Man, the prophet Isaiah had written hundreds of years before, “Surely our griefs He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried; yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed” (Isaiah 53:4-5).
The forerunner came to prepare the way of the Lord for ministry and for death. And before that, the forerunner’s mother became pregnant as a sign and confirmation to the young Mary that with God nothing is impossible (see Luke 1:37).
And in your life, despite all that may have transpired, God is working behind the scenes to will and to work for His good pleasure. Know that even as He orchestrated the details for everyone involved on that first Christmas, He is still active, orchestrating details for your life as well. And as you worship the One who made His debut here on earth as an infant in a manger, trust Him this Christmas to work out every one of your details, as well.
Dorothy
Faithful is He who calls you, and He also will bring it to pass. 1 Thessalonians 5:24
© 2015, Dorothy Frick
Read MoreO Holy Night: Christmas Series Part 2
“O holy night! The stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining.
Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.” By Placide Cappeau, 1847
God had a plan from way back, before the foundations of the earth. He created the species of man to fellowship with Him and to populate the planet. In His great wisdom and foresight—before we ever arrived on the scene—He saw that we would go our own way, fall into sin, and descend into the agony of spiritual darkness.
He gave the first hint of His plan to pull humanity out of the abyss of their own making early in man’s history. After the man and woman He created fell into deception and disobedience (see Genesis 3:1-7), God told the serpent, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel” (Genesis 3:15).
And so it came to pass. Jesus came to earth through the seed of woman; the virgin birth enabled the Savior to be both a Man—through Mary, His mother—and to be God, through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit (see Luke 1:35). And as history rolled on through time, God gave more hints about His plan to deliver men and women from their sinful nature through an astonishing sacrificial act. And according to Galatians 4:4, “…when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law.”
In due season. For millennia the world, steeped in sin, pined away in error, and tooled along on an evil course. So dark and oppressed was the race of man. The Jews, likewise subject to the permeating stain of sin, nonetheless held promise through their holy Scriptures of hope and help from Heaven that the Messiah—the stem of Jesse, the Promised One—would someday appear and set up His Kingdom.
At the right time. “…when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law.” Jesus, the Son of Man and the Son of God, was born at the right time into the history of the human race. Angels proclaimed His birth. Wise men from the east calculated—by the stars and Hebrew prophecy—the exact timing and location of the birth of this new King.
And the world?
“The thrill of hope
The weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.”
The shackles of sin would soon be broken by the voluntary sacrifice of the Man who now lay as a baby in a manger. “For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him” (John 3:17).
Yet for so many, the chains of sin remain, two thousand years later. Darkness still seems to permeate the planet. How could that be? Again, let’s look at Scripture. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
You see, Jesus voluntarily gave His life as a sacrifice for the sins of mankind; likewise, receiving deliverance from those sins is also on a voluntary basis for every individual man, woman, and child. “Whoever believes in Him…” is a voluntary act; the one true God never coerces or intimidates anyone into submission; He states His case, He reasons with facts, He displays signs and wonders, and He woos. When religion is imposed with threats or violence, God is not in it.
Many throughout the past two millennia have attempted to force their brand of “whoever believes in Him” upon others through coercion, threats, tyrannical laws, and wars. But wise souls have always known that such enforcement was never the plan of God. God’s plan—then, now, and forever—was this: for His Son to bear the sin, sorrow, and error of our race, thus canceling out our debt of sin, and to simply receive anyone and everyone who believed in Him from the heart as sons and daughters.
This is the reason for the “thrill of hope”. This is why the “weary world rejoices”. And this is why each soul can now feel its worth—because whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. The God of all things places great worth on each human soul; He sees worth in you.
We sing, we pray, we celebrate because of who that little baby was—the Sacrificial Lamb, the Son of God and the Son of Man. In the fullness of time, that little child of Bethlehem laid down His life for you and for me—voluntarily—because He valued us.
What can we do in response to such a great and selfless act? Listen to the carol:
“Fall on your knees
O hear the angel voices
O night divine
O night when Christ was born
O night divine
O night, o night divine.”
Take time this season to fall on your knees and affirm your faith in the baby of Bethlehem; worship Him—the Christ—the Son of God and the Son of Man.
Dorothy
© 2015, Dorothy Frick
Read MoreThe most wonderful time of the year; Christmas Series Part 1
“It’s the most wonderful time of the year
With the kids jingle belling
And everyone telling you ‘Be of good cheer’
It’s the most wonderful time of the year.”
By Edward Pola and George Wyle, © 1963.
Nothing captures the mood of the season quite like this song made famous by Andy Williams. There’s just something about the wonder and anticipation of Christmas that hangs in the atmosphere, draped across homes, offices, schools, and stores like garlands bedecked with twinkling lights. Even though several poor souls have attempted to Grinch the season away from the rest of us with a twisted form of righteous indignation and lawsuits, nevertheless, this is still the most wonderful time of the year. And the majority of us know it—the child within each one of us can’t help but hope for snow as we gaze out at the red and green, silver and gold fantasy of ornaments and lights, trees and glitter, sparkling on every corner of every street.
Many hearts open a bit wider at this time of year. Many—even those who don’t know the Lord intimately—hope for the promised cheer of the season to wrap them like a blanket and transport their heavy hearts to a brighter, kinder, more welcoming place. They’ve been disappointed so many times before; maybe this year will be different. Maybe this year they’ll be able to capture the joy and the essence of peace on earth, good will toward men. Maybe, just maybe…
My prayer is that you and I will be empowered by the One who is the reason for the season, not only to enjoy His presence and peace ourselves this season, but to be carriers of the message of His warm kindness and life-changing cheer to others as well. Despite the attacks against Christmas, I believe that the majority of those who do not know Jesus as Lord recognize that there’s something very special about this Man who was born to a virgin, wrapped in swaddling clothes, placed in a manger, and visited by shepherds and wise men.
I believe most people long for the Christmas story to be true; you need not be intimidated by the fact that you know it is true. Agree with me that both you and I will be directed by the Spirit of God throughout the season as we go about our daily lives. Pray that each of us have divine appointments ornamenting our days as we carry the message of the cheer of Christ in our hearts, eyes, smiles, and words.
And as you carry His presence with you like a light shining in a dark place, He will most certainly direct your steps.
Be of good cheer during this most wonderful time of the year!
Dorothy
The people who walk in darkness will see a great light; those who live in a dark land, the light will shine on them. Isaiah 9:2
© 2015, Dorothy Frick
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