Day 338 - It's OK to be weak.

Day 338 ...... and as everyone left Redeemer's Church this morning lunch was on us!
Thanks Juanito's for serving over 600 people great food.
Too bad folks if this was a Sunday you chose shopping or skiing over church!!

So one of our pastors this morning, Ann Hudson, guided our thinking to Isaiah 9 and the well known words "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders."

As Ann commented, this context of these words are decades of bloody tyrants, of warriors boots and garments rolled in blood .....and then boom - inappropriately and disconcertingly comes the words "For to us a child is born!"

You would expect that following the striking images of bloody warfare the prophet would have given us the image of a Messiah as a righteous warrior, or a judge, or like an Achilles or Ben Hur. But instead he describes the hope of Israel as first a child!

This pushes us.
As confident, educated, sophisticated people accepting weakness and need is perhaps more difficult for us moderns that more most people in the history of the world. Being weak in our culture is shameful.

But in how God reveals Christ, he reveals something necessary to embrace God's revelation. Listen to the words I read a few weeks ago:

"We are, in short, created with limited ways and abilities to know the world, so that we may enjoy needing God and each other."

Needing God - necessitates weakness.

God gave them a baby, a child ....in their greatest moment of need.

Wow!