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? [continue reading…]
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