Manger Throne

You could have stepped into creation
With fire for all to see
Brought every tribe and nation to their knees
Arriving with the host of heaven
In royal robe and crown
The rulers of the earth all bowing down

But You chose meekness over majesty
Wrapped Your power in humanity

Glory be to You alone
King who reigns from a manger throne
My life, my praise, everything I own
To Jesus the King on a manger throne

You could have marched in all your glory
Into the heart of Rome
Showed them splendour like they'd never known
But You wrote a better story
In humble Bethlehem

Creator in the arms of common men

… From heaven to the cradle
From cradle to the cross
Let heaven and nature sing
This is our King
But the grave couldn't hold Him
Our God has overcome
Let Heaven and nature sing
This is our King

Lyrics from part of the song, Manger Throne by Phil Wickham 

Advent is the season of waiting. Waiting to celebrate Jesus’ first coming and looking forward with great anticipation to his second coming. 

For centuries the Jewish people had been waiting for their Messiah to come. Isaiah had prophesied about him 700 years before, and they wanted one who would come in clouds of glory and put everything right. In Jesus’ day it was a Messiah who would drive out the hated Romans, but it could just as easily be the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, any of those nations who had oppressed God’s people. They wanted a Messiah who would arrive as the song above suggests.

However, what no one was expecting was a baby born in humility, born to poor, righteous parents and having nowhere to place their precious baby but a manger. Goodness knows what Mary thought of giving birth to the Son of God in such conditions. 

The first recorded visitors were shepherds, those who were almost certainly looking after the sacrificial lambs for the temple. What wonderful symbolism that they should come and worship the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world by the ultimate sacrifice of his perfect life upon a terrible cross. The great shepherd of the people (Hebrews 13:20) visited by shepherds. 

Then many months later, the magi arrived in an exotic caravan bearing fabulously expensive gifts, no doubt causing quite a stir in small town Bethlehem. 

The Messiah had been born who would not only save the Jewish people, even the poorest but also rich Gentiles. He would save anyone who would come, bow down, and give their worship and adoration to him alone. He would save them not from oppressors but the greatest oppression, sin. 

Jesus could have indeed come the first time in glory and majesty and swept mankind into a slavish obedience to the King of King and Lord of Lords. That path would not have saved us from the bondage of sin. Instead, he showed us the true path of love, service and sacrifice leading to redemption for all mankind. He invites us today to walk that same sacrificial path of lives yielded to him, overflowing with love and thankfulness for all he has done.

And so we also look forward with great anticipation to his second coming this time ‘in great splendour, with the host of heaven in royal robes and crown’ and he will right every wrong. Every oppressor, tyrant, dictator big and small will be dealt with in justice and righteousness, whilst believers will be rewarded and ushered into an eternity with him in the new heaven and earth.  

What a wonderful future we have. God’s reign of righteousness coming to Earth and restoring everything to its original mandate.

Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other. Psalm 85: 10.  What a promise!

Advent - re-setting our priorities

This coming Sunday, 29th November 2020, is Advent Sunday. Advent is a season that has been eased out of many churches nowadays which I feel is a great shame. In fact the whole Church calendar has been discarded in favour of celebrating just the big ones – Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. 

I would love to see the season of Advent make a comeback in every church not just the more traditional ones. Advent helps us prepare our hearts to celebrate the first coming of Jesus. We remind ourselves that Emmanuel – God with us, God made Man – came and lived on this Earth.  I like to use Advent to meditate on the wonder of this and the role the key players had in the birth of Jesus.

However, the more important aspect of Advent is that it helps us focus on the Second Coming of Jesus, the conclusion of all the first things and the shutting of the door to the old era and anticipating the new. 

This event, due to its delay, is not so much forgotten as placed on the back burner for future reference if needed.  The difficulty arises when like the wise and foolish virgins in Matthew 25: 1 – 13 we can easily get caught out. We know the bridegroom is coming but it may not be in my lifetime, so I’ll not attend to my lamp.  We forget we must always be ready. Indeed Jesus concludes the parable with, ‘Therefore keep watch, because you do no know the day or the hour.’  In fact Jesus labours this point that we must be ready because no one knows when Jesus will come again.  

Advent is a really useful time to remind ourselves of this; to review our preparedness for Jesus’ Second coming. Have we been effective witnesses, have we remembered the poor, the widows, the orphans? Will I bring sheaves of corn with me or have I been preoccupied with my own life, with virus, lockdown, and Christmas preparations? Or am I anticipating with joy Jesus’ Second Coming and the Wedding Feast of the Lamb?

I believe God is using the virus to work out something truly incredible on the planet – to see revival, souls saved, restoration and preparation before the Second Coming. 

As we consider Advent this year, I believe our response needs to be a deep clean in our own lives and in the life of the Church. Christians are all part of the Body of Christ and each one of us has a role and responsibility to be the solution and not the problem. 

Jesus needs his Church firing on all cylinders bringing the Kingdom to this world and we all have a part to play. We are all significant because only you have the connections and influence that you have. God wants to use you to bring life and hope and to show the way out of the virus of sin into a new life. 

Speaking from experience, it is all too easy to dwell on the disappointments of 2020 but God is calling us to rise up and bring light and hope to a world that has badly lost it way. We are called to pray and influence the nations so when Jesus comes again we will be ready, expectant and our lamps full of the oil of the Holy Spirit. 

Advent is a great time to re-set our priorities, to rejoice in God becoming Man, Emmanuel, but with fresh faith prepare ourselves for the Advent of Jesus, the soon coming King. 

Christmas Eve 2014

During Advent this year I have been reading J John’s daily devotional Advent Reflections. I have been struck again how God fulfils his purposes in often quite unexpected ways and uses the most unlikely and sometimes downright ungodly people to achieve his plans.

In particular I marvelled that God would use a Roman emperor who thought he was a god to get Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem and used one of the most evil, wicked rulers, Herod the Great, to get the magi to their destination.

What is incredible though is the reaction of the religious leaders when the magi arrived at Herod’s court and asked, ‘Where is he that is born King of the Jews?’ Herod called them and they correctly told both Herod and the magi that the King of the Jews, the Messiah, would be born in Bethlehem.

The magi then hotfooted off down the road to Bethlehem. So why didn’t the religious leaders go as well?’ It was only 5 miles away.

If an entourage of Middle Eastern magi pitched up on your doorstep, having travelled months to get there to come and worship your Messiah, you might think the religious leaders would want to investigate what was going on. They dismissed it though out of hand. They assumed, quite wrongly, that these magi couldn’t possibly know what they were talking about. The very people that the Messiah came to save couldn’t believe that God would talk to some Gentiles rather than to themselves, the religious leaders of the Jewish faith.

Too often, as Christians we wrongly assume we know how God works in a given situation. But God is God and he will do things his way. He will even use ungodly leaders to fulfil his purposes. Too often our prayers are for God to raise up Christians to places of influence and my goodness don’t we need that? Our societies and leaders need the Josephs and Daniels at the highest levels of government, media, education and so on.  However we also need to be open to see God working and answering our prayers in the most unlikely ways, using the most unlikely people.

The sad thing is that though the Jews have been praying for their Messiah for centuries, only a few recognised him when he came. Despite every indication given both at his birth and then during his ministry that Jesus is the Messiah, only a handful believed it.

My prayer is that our prejudices and short-sighted assumptions do not prevent us from seeing what God is doing in our day and that we do not limit God to working the way we think it should be. May our eyes be open to all he is doing and our hearts ready to receive him however and with whoever he chooses to use.