Today we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In preparing for this day, I have been thinking the past few weeks about the life and ministry of Jesus. There are so many things to love about Jesus and to thank him for. I want to share a few of these things here, and I want to address them to Jesus himself - my Lord and my God.
I love how devoted you were to prayer. (Mark 1:35; Luke 5:16, 6:12; Matthew 26:36-46)
I love how dedicated you were to the mission that God gave you. (Mark 1:35-39; John 17:12)
I love that you not only healed lepers, but that you healed them by touching them, though this would have made you ritually unclean according to Old Testament law. (Mark 1:40-45)
I love that you didn't call priests and scribes to be your apostles, and that you didn't begin your ministry among the spiritual elite of Jerusalem, but that you called fishermen and tax collectors to be your apostles, and that you began your ministry in the villages of Galilee. (Matthew 4:18-22, 9:9-13, 10:1-4)
I love that you dined with sinners, lepers, prostitutes, and tax collectors. (If you had chosen to incarnate today, I imagine that you would have dined with burned-out drug addicts, ex-convicts, politicians, lobbyists, HIV patients, and, of course, prostitutes.) I love that you allowed a woman of low social standing - perhaps a prostitute herself - to wash your feet with her hair when dining at the table of a man of high social standing. (Mark 2:13-17, Luke 7:36-50, 19:1-5)
I love that you healed everyone who came to you, including Jews and Gentiles - even the servant of a Roman centurion. I love that you healed a woman of a hemorrhage that may well have led to her being socially ostracized on the same day that you raised the daughter of a high synagogue official from the dead. (Matthew 8:5-13; Mark 5:21-43, 7:24-30, )
I love that you were such a powerful teacher. The Sermon on the Mount and the Last Supper Discourses are some of my favorite teachings of yours, but all of your teachings are priceless. They are all true, and they are all life-giving. They are unparalleled by anything else, and I treasure them dearly. (Matthew 5:1-7:29, Mark 8:34-38, Luke 16:19-31, John 14:1-16:33)
I love that you fed thousands of people from a few pieces of bread and fish. I love that you walked on water, calmed storms, cured all manner of diseases, and raised people from the dead. I love that even though you were capable of performing such deeds, you did so relatively sparingly, and always for the good for others. (Mark 4:35-41,5: 21-43, 6:34-52, 7:31-8:10, 8:22-26, 10:46-52)
I love that you washed the feet of your disciples. (John 13:1-20)
I love how completely morally good and virtuous you were. When I read passages such as Mark 3:31-35 and 12:28-34 and Luke 11:27-28 and 14:12-14, I am filled with admiration for your great goodness, and I feel myself deeply stirred by the moral example that you set for us all.
I love that you were so gracious and patient with us, and that you were so forgiving. (Mark 8:14-21, 9:14-29, 10:35-45; Luke 22:31-34; John 21:15-19)
I love that went to the cross for us. In doing so, you rescued us from sin and death, but you also demonstrated a measure of humility, courage, and self-sacrifice the likes of which the world will never see again.
I love how you revealed yourself to Mary Magdalene at the tomb, and that you ate fish with the disciples before departing for heaven. (John 20:11-18, 21:1-14)
I love that you loved us so dearly, and that you called us your friends. (John 15:11-17)
Lord Jesus Christ, I thank you for dying for me. I thank you for saving me from sin and death, and for reconciling me with the Father. I thank you for sending the Holy Spirit to me and to all believers. I thank you for your teaching and your moral example. I thank you for healing me of depression and anxiety. You have already brought me back from the dead; you have rehabilitated my crushed spirit and breathed new life into me. Thank you for this. And thank you for bringing me to repentance. Thank you for showing me that I was lost to sin, hostile to God in mind and a stranger to the covenant promises. Thank you for justifying me by faith, and calling me to be one of your people. Thank you for showing me that real happiness consists in self-denial, humility, and self-sacrificial love; that there is far more joy in building up others than in asserting oneself; and that true contentment comes from serving God and others. Thank you for calling me not only to faith, but also to discipleship.
I am truly the least of your disciples. I rejected you for the first twenty years of my life; and, when I finally confessed that Christ is God, it still took me more than a decade to really accept Him as my Lord and Savior. I have been prideful, arrogant, ungrateful, and self-centered, loving myself more than all things - which is to say, loving myself very badly and others even worse. Still, you were determined to count me among your disciples. What can I say? I have been saved by the God of the universe, and at tremendous cost to Himself. I have finally begun to understand something of what St. Paul meant when he said that he counted everything a loss because of Christ. Bless you Lord Jesus. Let every knee bend before you and declare that you are Lord, and may your name be magnified throughout heaven and earth.
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