The Fore Telling

We are a people who like to know what's coming next!  As a young girl, I loved going to the State Fair in Jackson, Mississippi.  Foolishly, my girlfriends and I always wanted to visit the palm reader.  We were in middle school wanting to know what was coming next.  Will I find a boyfriend who will like an overweight girl with freckles?  Will I go to college? Will I marry?  Will I have kids?  The palm reader would read our palms and all the answers seemed amazingly similar for each of us but we somehow didn't notice.  For she was telling us what we wanted to hear.  So, we happily paid our few coins and anticipated our futures!

Much more significantly, God also fore told some great news about our lives.  The Christmas season offers us a joyful type of fore telling....Christmas is coming!  Get ready!  Only 17 shopping days left!  Children are anticipating, excited for Christmas morning.  We know what's coming and we anticipate!  But isn't the fore telling pointing to more than gifts, food, lights and ribbon?

Recently, a Chinese friend experiencing Christmas for the first time asked me, "Ms. Kathy, if Jesus was born so many years ago, why do you still anticipate his birth?  I mean wasn't he already born?  Shouldn't people just have a birthday party for him?  It seems like such a big celebration for a simple birth."

What am I anticipating this Christmas, I pondered?  Yes, it was a simple birth but the birth of a complex Baby.  Let's remember that for generations and generations people had been anticipating a Savior King, waiting and watching for His arrival. For a Savior would save them from their difficult lives, they're persecution, the hard times of life.  Two thousand years later, it seems we too anticipate such a savior.  Our worlds sound similar, don't you think?  People are looking for someone to remedy their pain, someone to fill the void.  And this simple baby, complex King came then, comes today, will come this Christmas.

But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.  For no word from God will ever fail.”  Luke 1:30-32, 34-36, 37

Mary received news that she could have never expected.  How could such a fore telling have been expected?  The news was too unreal to comprehend or understand.  And even today, when we hear that Christmas is coming perhaps we too hesitate to truly comprehend the news.  Perhaps we get stuck in the to do list of the season.  Maybe the news of Jesus' birth is taken-for-granted so that it's not even Good News to us but just OK news (Mike Yaconelli).  

What is the big deal, she asked?  He was already born, right?  My answer to the student was, "Yes, He has come, He is coming and He will come again.  The greatest gift of life is coming to find me and you.  He didn't wait for us to find Him; He comes today, tomorrow and yesterday to meet us".  That's the big deal.  That is the fore telling of the Savior.  Anticipate this wonderful, incredible miraculous fore telling of the Savior.  He wrote your story on His hands.  He wrote His story on our hands.