I love Christmas because it is a season that is filled with song. While there are many Christmas songs that are just plain bad, there are so many Christmas songs that have been written throughout the history of the church and are being written today, which beautifully remind us of the Good News of Jesus and just exactly what happened at Christmas.
As Pastor Mark wrote about in his blog post yesterday, we are beginning our Christmas series this weekend – What Child Is This? I love that title because it causes us to take a familiar line of a wonderful Christmas carol and really explore its meaning and use. Christmas must cause us to pause and ask “what Child is this?” Christmas is when the God of all creation broke into history and entered our humanity by becoming like us, by taking on human flesh.
As we(your pastors) were discussing the series for this year and how we would look at God’s promises in the Old Testament to rescue humanity and how we would explore in the New Testament how Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment of all of God’s promises, I was reminded of an amazing Christmas song that was written a couple of years ago. The song is called Who Would Have Dreamed and it was written by some of the gifted songwriters of Sovereign Grace Music. I knew that this was a song that we should incorporate into our “songbook” for the Christmas season! We got to hear Kristen Blackford sing it last Sunday. The words say:
On a starlit hillside, shepherds watched their sheep
Slowly, David’s city drifted off to sleep
But to this little town of no great renown
The Lord had a promise to keep
Prophets had foretold it, a mighty King would come
Long awaited Ruler, God’s Anointed One
But the Sovereign of all looked helpless and small
As God gave the world His own Son
And who would have dreamed or ever foreseen
That we could hold God in our hands?
The Giver of Life is born in the night
Revealing God’s glorious plan
To save the world
Wondrous gift of heaven: the Father sends the Son
Planned from time eternal, moved by holy love
He will carry our curse and death He’ll reverse
So we can be daughters and sons
When I first heard this song, I was overwhelmed by its beauty and poignancy. This song really helps us to express how awesome our God’s fulfillments of His promises are. So great is his plan that no person could have ever dreamed it or ever foreseen it – that we could hold God in our hands. Do you get that? Jesus of Nazareth who is “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and [who] upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3) entered into humanity and became a helpless, nursing infant that we could literally “hold in our hands.” Unimaginable! The song goes on – The Giver of Life was born in the night revealing God’s glorious plan to save the world.
As you can see, this song evokes powerful imagery to help us “get” it. To help us understand and remember what Christmas is all about. I hope that you will enjoy singing it with me and that it can become a standard Christmas song for Grace Baptist Church in the years to come. You can follow the link HERE to listen to the song and help you learn it as we prepare to sing it on Sunday.
Also, for a wonderful analysis of this song that goes into a lot more detail read the gifted writer from DesiringGod.org, Jon Bloom’s article HERE.
For this Sunday:
As we prepare for this Sunday’s corporate worship gathering please remember to spend some time in prayer asking God to once again remind our hearts of the great privilege and importance of our weekly church family worship gathering. As Pastor Mark mentioned, Pastor Brady will be preaching from Genesis 3 and showing us how God chooses to enter the conflict after Adam and Eve sinned. Spend some time reading through Genesis 3 and familiarizing yourself with it. You can view the order of worship HERE and pray through it and prepare yourselves for all the songs that we will be singing. Remember to try to be early to the worship service so that you do not feel hurried as you arrive. Finally, as always, we ask that you spend some time praying for all those who are doing some part to help lead the service.
See you Sunday!
