Today’s the day! For weeks we have been waiting and preparing for this day to arrive. It’s Christmas Eve! In just a few more hours we will all close our eyes and open them on the day of our Savior’s birth. Each year at my church we gather together on this special evening in order to celebrate the reason for the season as a body. We don’t make it long or terribly fancy. But it is memorable and meaningful. This year I’m involving the kids in the message in a way I haven’t before. They’ll be right up on stage with me, and I’ll share some fun things about the Christmas story with them while the adults get to listen in. Hopefully it’s going to be a good time. With this in mind, for today’s post (the last, with the exception of next Monday, until after the New Year) I thought that I would give you a sneak peek at what I will be sharing with them. May today be a day of joyfulness and rejoicing for you. Merry Christmas!

Hi guys! Are you guys excited about Christmas coming tomorrow? I am super excited. Waking up on Christmas morning and discovering what is waiting for everyone under and around the tree is one of my favorite times of the whole year. 

So, I have a question for you guys this evening: Who usually gets big news first? If something really important happens somewhere in the world, who do you think the first people to know about it are? (Wait for a few answers…but don’t let things veer off the rails.) Usually, when something big happens, it is the most important people who learn about it first. When big news happens in a school, the principal is the first to know about it. If something dramatic happens in Oakboro, Mayor Eury or Police Chief Presler will likely be the first to know about it. They will then tell others about what happened. 

Well, a long time ago, a man named Dr. Luke, who was a follower of Jesus, interviewed Jesus’ mom, Mary, and asked her about when Jesus was born. He tells us in Luke 2 that just before Mary delivered her baby, she had to go with her fiancee to a town called Bethlehem because the government wanted to tax its people, and in order to make sure everybody paid the right amount, they made everybody go to the place their family was from. Joseph was in the same family line as King David, so he had to go back to the town where David was from. Unfortunately, there were a whole lot of people from that town because when Mary and Joseph got there, there was nowhere for them to stay. They wound up having to stay in a barn, except the barns they used back then in that part of the world were often just caves. 

Have you ever been to a petting zoo or barn? How does it smell? Can you imagine how bad a whole bunch of animals all living in a cave would smell? I’ve been to a petting zoo before, and it was pretty smelly. Putting all those animals in a cave would have smelled terrible! But that’s the only place Mary and Joseph could find to stay, so there they were. And while they were staying in that cave, the time came for Mary to have her baby. Dr. Luke tells us that “While they were there, the time came for her to give birth. Then she gave birth to her firstborn Son, and she wrapped him tightly in cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.” 

I have another question for you: Who was Mary’s baby? Jesus! Jesus wasn’t just an ordinary baby, though, was He? Before Mary got pregnant, an angel actually came to visit her to tell her about what was going to happen. That angel, whose name was Gabriel, told Mary this: “Now listen: You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will have no end.”

Long before Jesus was born, God told the people that He was going to send a special person one day who would help fix all the places that were broken in Israel and in the whole world. This person would be called the Messiah. Jesus, Mary’s little baby, was this Messiah. And here He was, born in a barn and having to use the trough where the animals in the barn ate as His crib. 

As much as His birth circumstances didn’t seem to suggest as much, do you think Jesus was pretty important? Of course! Jesus was God in human flesh. God became fully human—just like you and me—and came to earth as a baby in the person of Jesus. This was the most important person ever to be born in the whole history of the world! 

Well, given how important Jesus was, we could have expected that the news of His birth was announced first to all of the most important people in the region. But is that what happened? Nope! Who were the first people to hear about Jesus’ birth? That’s right: Shepherds! 

Dr. Luke tells us like this: “In the same region, shepherds were staying out in the fields and keeping watch at night over their flock. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.” 

What kind of face do you think the shepherds made when they saw this angel? Show me your best shocked face. Now your best scared face. If an angel, shining like a bright flashlight, was suddenly standing up on stage here with us, we would probably be terrified too! 

But what did the angel tell the shepherds? Dr. Luke tells us: “Don’t be afraid, for look, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people: Today in the city of David a Savior was born for you, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be the sign for you: You will find a baby wrapped tightly in cloth and lying in a manger.” After this, Luke tells us, the whole army of heaven appeared with the first angel, and all of them were praising God together: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace on earth to people he favors!” 

Shepherds were smelly. They hung out in the fields all day and all night with a bunch of smelly sheep and goats. They didn’t take baths. They probably never brushed their teeth. They did a job nobody wanted to do. They didn’t get paid very well. Nobody thought shepherds were important. Nobody thought they mattered. Nobody wanted to be a shepherd. Being a shepherd meant you couldn’t do anything else. 

But God didn’t think that. When He came to earth as a baby, as the most important baby ever to have been born in the whole history of humanity, the first people He told about His arrival, the first people to whom He gave the job of spreading the news were a bunch of smelly shepherds. It’s almost like God didn’t see them as smelly shepherds at all, but rather potential servants in His kingdom. Serving in God’s kingdom is a pretty high honor. These shepherds went from being the people nobody wanted to be to being the handpicked representatives of the King of the Universe, announcing to everyone they could that the Messiah had come into the world. That’s about the biggest promotion anyone has ever received. 

Indeed, God came as a baby, Jesus for this reason: To take people nobody would think of as worth very much, to entrust big things into their care, and to give them some of His power so they can do great things with them. Sometimes people look at kids like you guys and think, “Well, they’re just kids. They can’t do very much.” That’s not how God thinks. Sometimes people look at grown ups who don’t have a lot of money or don’t seem to have many talents or who have made tough choices in their past or who can’t speak very well or who the world just doesn’t look at as worth very much, and think, “Well, they’re not very good. What can they do?” That’s not how God thinks. 

Jesus came to make every single person willing to trust their lives into His hands far more than the world thinks they are; far more than they think they can be. With Jesus, nobody gets overlooked or left behind. With Jesus, everyone matters. This is the case because that same Jesus who was born as a baby eventually grew to be a man who would give up His life in order to save ours. Now, when we are willing to trust in Him and live life His way—something the Scriptures help us to understand—we can become more than we ever imagined we could be just like those first smelly shepherds. All it takes is our willingness to say, yes, to Him.