The Lord Jesus always has competition for the affections of our hearts. Perhaps that is especially true at this time of year. Good becomes enemy of the best. We allow the lights and the presents to overshadow what is at the heart of the celebration. We allow a shallow and fading joy to rob us of real joy. We may sing about it with our lips, but if we are honest, we have a hard time adoring Christ the Lord.
And there is one reason above all others why we don’t adore Christ as we might, why gifts win out over God’s gift. We don’t often have a strong sense of the greatness of our sin as an offense against God. The Puritan John Owen wrote: “He who has slight thoughts of sin never had great thoughts of God.” We don’t find God’s grace amazing because we don’t find our sins all that great and troublesome. We are looking through the wrong end of the telescope when we think about our sins. We see them as small and inconsequential. And until we are persuaded of what the Bible says, that we all deserve God’s eternal judgment, Christ will not be truly precious to us.
Allow the wonder of this truth to grip your hearts – Jesus, God the Son, left the glories of heaven where there was no sin to come into a world full of sin. Sin is what compelled Christ to come. More precisely, it was His love for sinners that compelled Him to come and suffer in the place of all who trust in Him. As the apostle Peter put it, “Christ suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order that He might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18).
A mission was planned within the Godhead before the foundation of the world (1 Peter 1:20-21) and it was put into operation in Christ’s incarnation. What did this journey from heaven to earth involve? The apostle Paul tells us: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). In this verse Paul ties together the birth of Christ with His reason for coming.
In this verse Paul turns our attention to the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Grace is one of those Christian words that can easily roll off our tongues without really appreciating what it means. This verse describes grace in terms of two aspects of the life of our Lord Jesus.
First, though He was rich He became poor. When was Jesus rich? Paul is pushing the frontiers of our thinking back to the period before His birth, into eternity past, to His eternal existence with the Father. He was rich in the glory He shared with His Father before the foundation of the world.
But there is a second dimension to this grace. Why did Jesus become poor? “So that we through His poverty might become rich.” Paul tells us that Jesus who was infinitely rich became infinitely poor so that we who are infinitely poor because of our sin might become infinitely rich and know the joy of the forgiveness of our sins. Have you grasped the spiritual poverty that is ours by nature and what Jesus has done to remedy that?
It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn who said upon coming to the West, “This western world is like a shop window in one of our great cities where all the price tags have been changed around. The really valuable things are priced as next to nothing, and the worthless things are most valued, and people will give everything, including their life for them.” We clamor after things that are perishing, and thinking we are self-sufficient, we give no thought to how spiritually impoverished we really are by nature.
Jesus did not come “to help those who help themselves.” He came to help those who are utterly helpless. Do you ever sit down and think about this if you are a Christian believer, that this is what Christ has done for you? What riches are yours!
Our zeal and our adoration have been tempered by the material and the ephemeral. We get more excited about a football game than we do about gospel realities. Our hearts are tugged in a thousand different directions because that one essential tug is often missing. Go back and contemplate the cross. It alone can explain how great our sin and misery really are. Jesus was born to die. The more we see our sin, and call it what it is, the more we will see the beauty of Christ, and the more we will adore Him, Christ the Lord.
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