SATURDAY 25th
Isaiah 7:14
NIV (v14) ‘Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.’
ESV (v14) ‘Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.’
Yes, I know it’s a Saturday, but it’s not just any Saturday, its Christmas morning, and although I don’t usually send a devotion out on a Saturday or a Sunday, I will be doing so this weekend. Firstly, to wish all our readers both from Emmanuel Pentecostal Church and those who read either through text, email, or the internet a very Happy Christmas. May you truly know God’s peace and joy today as we celebrate the birth of our Saviour the Lord Jesus Christ.
Some of us will meet, as we join at the Church for our Christmas morning service, others may not be able to do so, but wherever we are and during all that we will be doing on this festive day it is important that we spend some time giving thanks from grateful hearts to God for sending Jesus, and to Jesus himself, to thank him for coming.
Imagine knowing as a baby that the purpose for your coming into this world was to die, and not just an ordinary kind of death through natural causes but by the means of an awful, cruel, excruciating way, that of crucifixion, and yet this is exactly what was happening to the One whose birth we are remembering today.
In Philippians 2 we are reminded that although He was equal with God, he made himself of no reputation, humbling himself, by taking on the form of a servant and by becoming obedient unto death, even death on a cross, the Hebrew writer says that for the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame, and what was the joy set before him? It was seeing you and me, those who are the redeemed of the Lord gathered with him around the throne, seeing us as men and women who had been steeped in sin, yet washed by his precious blood.
May we never forget that it cost enormously for the first Christmas morning to happen, it cost enormously for the sins of the world to be atoned for, so let us make sure that today of all days we have hearts that are full of gratitude, for when Jesus came, he had you and he had me on his mind, for he came into this world to save sinners. The song for today is a simple one, but so true:
Emmanuel, Emmanuel, His name is called Emmanuel,
God with us, revealed in us, His name is called Emmanuel.