In Luke 11:33–35, Jesus says, “Your eye is a lamp, lighting up your whole body. If you live in wide-eyed wonder and belief, your body fills up with light. If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar. Keep your eyes open, your lamp burning, so you don’t get musty and murky. Keep your life as well-lighted as your best-lighted room” (The Message).
The Miracle of the Christmas Story
Acts 17:25 says that God “gives all men life and breath.” Job 34:14–15 says that if God were to withdraw his breath from humankind, we would return to dust. In other words, every breath we take is a miracle. Because we’ve heard the Christmas story so many times, we forget the amazing miracle it was. God came to earth in the form of a man. We need to take time to get lost in the wonder of this miracle.
The Mystery of the Christmas Story
The fundamental mistake the religious leaders of Jesus day made was trying to force God to fit into their religious boxes (Matthew 23:23). Instead of being conformed to God’s image, they tried to recreate God in their image. What they ended up with was “God in a box.” Jesus healed people on the Sabbath, and instead of celebrating the amazing miracles, the leaders plotted to kill him. Why? Because he didn’t fit in their box. In his book Rumors of Another World, Philip Yancey says there are two ways of looking at the world.
"One takes the world apart, while the other seeks to connect and put it together.” He goes on to say, “We live in an age that excels at the first and falters at the second.” Similarly, there are two ways of approaching God. One approach takes God apart. We make God manageable and measurable. We reduce God to a set of propositions, seal-tight theologies, or divine formulas. We fall into the trap of reductionism. In the words of A.W. Tozer, we end up with a God who can “never surprise us, never overwhelm us, never astonish us, never transcend us.”
Albert Einstein said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.” Experience the mystery of Christmas—the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God of all creation was born as a helpless little baby in Bethlehem.
~ Mark Batterson
In The Hands of the Refiner 