Into the Mess
My high school Calculus teacher was a retired commander in the U.S. military. He would often work out problems on the chalkboard (back when there were chalkboards in classrooms), going through many steps and covering the entire board with equations and computations. In the midst of the long, arduous problem-solving process and before finally arriving at the solution, he would stand back, look at what was on the board, and utter one of his characteristic expressions: “We’re in a mell of a hess now.”
The same can be said of the world today. One doesn’t need to look very hard to see that the world is indeed “in a mess.” Wars, disease, famines, wildfires, political strife, etc. It all seems rather distressing, overwhelmingly bad, and totally hopeless. This is not new. It has been so since the fall of mankind.
It is into that world—that “mess”—that a little baby would be born. This was no ordinary baby. In the words of This Baby, by Steven Curtis Chapman:
This baby made the angels sing. This baby made a new star shine in the sky. This baby had come to change the world. This baby was God’s own Son; this baby was like no other one. This baby was God with us; this baby was Jesus.
At Christmas, we remember HOW Jesus came—born as a baby in the most humble of circumstances. We remember Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, the angels, the wise men and the star. But as we remember how Jesus came, let us also remember WHY Jesus came. Though whole books have been written about this, here are a few to ponder this Christmas season:
Jesus came to save sinners (1 Timothy 1:15), to bring light to a dark world (John 12:46), to testify to the truth (John 18:37), to seek and save the lost (Luke 19:10), to serve and to pay our debt (Mark 10:45), to defeat the devil and his works (Hebrews 2:14, 1 John 3:8), to give us abundant life (John 10:10), to give us eternal life (John 3:16, John 6:51), to call sinners to repentance (Luke 5:32, Mark 2:17), to reconcile man to God (Romans 5:10), to proclaim the good news about the kingdom of God (Mark 1:38), to die on a cross for the sins of the world (John 12:27).
Jesus is God’s plan to rescue us from our “messy” sinful state. Jesus entered the “mess” to offer hope to a world in desperate need. God provided the solution—the one solution—to this “mess” we are in: His very own Son. This is what we celebrate at Christmas.
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as the curse is found.
(Verse 3, Joy to the World)
