"Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?"
OPEN YOUR EYES
Open your eyes
See the new day
The night has passed
Away
Open your eyes
See God's grace
Shining on
Today
Open your eyes
Praise the Lord
The truth is in
His Word
Open your heart
See with new eyes
Death is conquered in Light
Jeff Pollock
12-07-2012
For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness,"
made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light
of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
The Greatest Life of All
JESUS
Deity in Diapers
THE CHILD
As wise men from the East began their westward trek to find the Son of God and worship him, Mary delivered her child and "laid Him in a manger' (Luke 2:7). The ancient reader would not have missed the point of Luke's detail. Mary laid deity in diapers in a feeding trough, which is to say that the place of His birth---a stable---was even more humble than the detested inn.
Phillip Keller, in his fine work entitled Rabboni, offers this imaginative depiction of that night:
The sheep corral, filthy as only an Eastern animal enclosure can be, reeked pungently with manure and urine accumulated across the seasons. Joseph cleared a corner just large enough for Mary to lie down. Birth pains had started. She writhed in agony on the ground, Joseph, in his inexperience and unknowing manly manner, did his best to reassure her. His own outer tunic would be her bed, his rough saddlebag her pillow. Hay, straw, or other animal fodder was non-existent. This was not hay- or grain-growing country. Stock barely survived by grazing on the sparse vegetation that sprang from that semi-desert terrain.
Mary moaned and groaned in the darkness of the sheep shelter. Joseph swept away the dust and dirt from a small space in one of the hand-hewn mangers carved from soft limestone rock. He arranged a place where Mary could lay the newborn babe all bundled up in the clothes she had brought along.
And there, alone, unaided, without strangers or friends to witness her ordeal, in the darkness, she delivered her son. It was the unpretentious entrance, the stage entrance of the Son of God, very God in human form---on earth's stage. *
Profiles in Character from Charles R. Swindoll pp. 38-39
* Phillip Keller, Rabboni… Which Is To Say Master (Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1977), 56-57
The people walking in darkness have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.
The people living in darkness have seen a great light, and for those living in the land and shadow of death, a light has risen."
