December 25th is far more than a date on the calendar. Yes, it's true that Christmas allows us to measure our lifespan in increments, as we sentimentally recall the peaceful mornings of yesteryear. But today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll invites us to elevate our nostalgic memories of Christmas to a higher plane. Where we find the undisputed record of Jesus' birth. It was on this epic day God vacated His throne in heaven in order to take on the human condition. Before the message begins, Chuck leads us in prayer.
When space ever becomes a hurdle for you, you span the extremes and have done so since eternity passed. Speak to us today, Father, and as we return to the ancient scene that is in some ways familiar, but other ways completely unfamiliar to us, may we find ourselves in that animal shelter. Where two nervous teenagers were with one another for the birth of a firstborn, and you brought him to this earth, giving us your one and only son. How good of you to do that, and how grateful we are that you did. Give us a special sense of gratitude this day as we remember your gift, which is just too wonderful for words. And use our gifts now, Father, as we give them. May they wing their way to places we'll never go, touching lives of people we'll never meet, who speak languages we'll never speak. We pray that you will use these funds in a beautiful way to lift and encourage hearts far beyond these walls. We commit this ministry to you, this morning's word from your book, and the season for we exalt your son Jesus, our Savior. We give our gifts and we ask this prayer in his name. And all God's people said, amen. You're listening to Insight for Living.
To search the scriptures with Chuck Swindoll, be sure to download his Searching the Scriptures studies by going to insightworld.org slash studies. Today's message is titled, Let's Hear God's Voice in a Baby's Cry. Now I want to tell you about the most surprising gift of all and what a privilege it is to do it. This is my 56th Christmas message.
All right. And I honestly am as excited about this one as I was about the first one. First one, I was really nervous.
I'm not nervous now. I'm just excited to tell you about God's special gift to all of us. His love gift from heaven. He could have given us anything and he gave us his best gift. John tells us, God so loved the world, put your name there. God so loved you that he gave you his only begotten son. That if you believe in him, you will never perish, but you will have everlasting life. God saved his very best gift, a sacrificial gift, and gave him to us. When Paul wrote about that gift, years later he used these words, Thank God for his gift, too wonderful for words.
Listen to the way others have paraphrased or translated 2 Corinthians 9.15. Thanks be to God, J.B. Phillips paraphrases, for his indescribable generosity. James Moffat, for his unspeakable gift.
The Good News Bible, for his priceless gift. Chrysostom uses the rare term ineffable. It's an old word, ineffable. This word prompted another man to write, When what God bestows is ineffable, what must the gift be himself? I've noticed it's the tendency of artists to portray this gift, too wonderful for words, in an overstated manner.
By that I mean they will add to the little infant a halo, or they'll put an aura, a glowing aura about the child, and make him look angelic. It was none of that. In appearance, he just looked like any other Jewish baby. The truth is, talk about surprises, God, who came to earth to live among us, did not come as a raging whirlwind or in a devouring fire, commanding the world to bow down and worship.
No. What stands out is a term that no great king ever used. What stands out is the humility of it all, the obscurity of it, because most people will never go to Israel.
You have to imagine a place like Bethlehem, or even a shelter behind a place of lodging, where they found where they would stay. One man writes, unimaginably, the Maker of all things shrank down, down, down, so small as to become an ovum, a single fertilized egg barely visible to the naked eye, an egg that would divide and re-divide until a fetus took shape, enlarging cell by cell inside a nervous teenager. Another wrote, immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.
That's the way the poet John Donne put it. He made himself nothing. You remember Paul's words? He humbled himself and became a servant. Those who lived in that day, and many even today, remembered the words of the prophet, which didn't sound very humble when you read them. Go back to Isaiah chapter 9, verse 6. Turn there, where the prophet writing, get this, seven, eight hundred years before the birth of the Messiah. Seven to eight hundred years before then, Isaiah wrote, nine, verse six, a child is born to us, a son is given to us. Look at those two phrases. The child is born, that's the earthly point of view, where a woman has a child.
A son is given, that's the heavenly point of view, where God gave his son, so both are covered here. And then immediately the prophet races to the time when he will reign as king of kings and lord of lords. And look at these exalted words. The government will rest on his shoulders. The word will moves us to the future, future even to our day.
The government will rest on his shoulders. He will be called literally a wonder of a counselor, mighty God, father of eternity, literally peace prince. Look at those words, wonderful, mighty, eternal prince. His government and its peace will never end, and on and on it goes. When you read that, you anticipate the arrival of royalty, but that's not how he came the first time.
That's how he will come the second time. But the first time, which is what we observe every Christmas season, his arrival is anything but a royal arrival. Every year I sort of dust off Philip Yancey's book, The Jesus I Never Knew. It's a wonderful book that covers the birth of Jesus and his life in a very unusual way.
He writes in a way that you don't normally read from a Christian author, as he writes of a Jesus that he came to realize and was never taught when he was growing up about him. I quote from his work, In London, looking toward the auditorium's royal box, where the Queen and her family sat, I caught glimpses of the more typical way rulers stride through the world with bodyguards, and a trumpet flare, and a flourish of bright clothing and flashing jewelry. Queen Elizabeth II had recently visited these United States, and reporters delighted in spelling out the logistics involved.
Listen to these logistics. Her 4,000 pounds of luggage included two outfits for every occasion, a mourning outfit in case someone died while visiting the States, 40 pints of plasma, and white kid leather toilet seat covers. She brought along her own hairdresser, two valets, a driver for her vehicle, and a host of other attendants.
A brief visit of royalty to a foreign country can easily cost $20 million. Yancey continues, In meek contrast, God's visit to Earth took place in an animal shelter with no attendants present and nowhere to lay the newborn king but a feed trough. The event that divided history and even our calendars into two parts may have had more animals than human witnesses.
A mule could have stepped on him. How silently, how silently this wondrous gift is given. In the flare and flourish of our Christmas season, pause. Be still. Return to the realism of the original scene. Don't dress it up.
Don't make it look good or smell good. It was a rough place. Even though we read the familiar account in Luke chapter 2, every year it never fails to grip us with a sense of surprise. When God made his entrance into this earth, onto this earth, he came as an unknown, an unexpected one.
No trumpet flare, no loud announcement from some king. He chose a virtually unknown couple from up in Galilee, Nazareth, where a contemporary once said, can anything good come out of Nazareth? Sort of a, sort of a military town where soldiers bivouacked and buried. This couple traveled on foot from Nazareth, 90 miles, down to Bethlehem of Judea while she was heavy with that child of hers. And when they reached their destination, get this, no one was there to greet them because no one knew them. No place had been reserved for their lodging.
All the places were filled because this was taxation time and everybody had returned to their distant county seat to register. There was no food, there was no water brought to them, only what they could scavenge or draw from a nearby well in a borrowed bucket. There were no bathroom facilities available. No midwife was there to assist this Jewess, this teenage girl, this mother-to-be about to bear her firstborn. I pause here and ask you who are mothers to remember your firstborn. Remember your feelings, and most likely you had clean bedsheets, quite probably you were in a hospital surrounded by a nursing staff that was competent and caring, a physician that was close and ready, a specialist in obstetrics. And there were others there in case of an emergency.
There were instruments available to help you, everything to make it as comfortable as it could be. But we read in Luke 2, and I want them to land hard in your mind, while they were there the time came for her baby to be born. She's never had a baby. She's going to have it on the dirt floor of an animal shelter where she will squat.
And Joseph will help as best he can. And by the way, husbands aren't really that helpful. That's why they don't let us in there that much, at least they used to not. When Cynthia had our four, when labor really got intense, they ushered us out. It was, in our case, for our first born, it was at Baylor Hospital. I was a third-year student at Dallas Seminary, and Cynthia was in there having a baby, and I'm out trying to look cool, sitting among seasoned dads in what was called the dad's den. And I'm reading a newspaper. A guy looks over at me, sitting there in overalls, and he says, first baby? And I go, yeah, yeah, really.
He said, I figured because your newspaper's upside down. They don't know what they're doing. We got this thing all religious looking, and that nativity scene, there's no blood and stuff all over, everything. There shouldn't be, but it's really clean.
There's nothing clean about this. She gave birth to her first born son, and she cleans him up as best she can, cuts the cord, and holds him close. And like the song goes that we love, when she kissed her little baby, she kissed the face of God. These are the beautiful details that emerge from the amazing story of Jesus' birth that very first Christmas, more than 2,000 years ago. You're listening to Insight for Living and a message from Chuck Swindoll titled, Let's Hear God's Voice in a Baby's Cry.
In a moment, we'll hear a moving illustration from Chuck about his early years of marriage, so please stay with us. And then to learn more about this ministry, visit us online at insightworld.org. It's important to remind you that these daily programs are available to a global audience because of the generous support that arrives during the month of December. To that end, we're calling on friends like you to join us in the all-out effort to bring God's message of Jesus' miraculous birth to all 195 countries of the world. In fact, at this very moment, while you're enjoying this program in your own hometown, Chuck's teaching spans the globe, not only in English, but often translated into local languages as well. Through Vision 195, and together with friends like you, we can implement the Great Commission of Jesus by making disciples through radio, our website, the mobile app, CDs, books, DVDs, the podcast, our live stream feed, and more.
While 2020 was filled with unwanted surprises, we're not deterred from this desire to pursue Vision 195. A long time ago, when our oldest children were still babies, Cynthia and I were living in the Northeast. Cynthia, whose father had been violently dysfunctional, was sinking into a pit of depression. She had seen one counselor after another. She had taken medications that doctors now know are in fact dangerous.
They didn't know that then. Everything we tried made things worse. We felt so alone. Behind our home was an alley.
One night, as Cynthia slept soundly, and the babies as well, I went out for a late-night walk all alone. I got about halfway down that dark alley, and I just stopped. I looked up, and I cried out, Help me, Lord. I don't know what to do.
Please help me. I'm running out of hope. Have you ever been there?
Are you there right now? If 2020 has knocked you to your knees, you understand better than most. So listen to my next words closely. God is in that long, dark alley. He's not oblivious. He's not absent. He cares.
And best of all, He is working. In that alley, I couldn't fathom how we were going to make it through the next week, to say nothing of the next year. How could the Lord set Cynthia free from such depression? I had no idea. I had no understanding that He would one day use her testimony to help others battling with the same darkness. Many years ago, Insight for Living Ministries wasn't even a dream.
It wasn't even a blip on the screen. I had no idea the Lord would take my calling to preach and build a wonderful ministry under the leadership of my wonderful wife, who pulled out of that depression beautifully. Having suffered through such dark days, she became a woman of strength and grit, with a heart set on reaching all the nations. We had no clue, but God did. Our God is the God of impossibilities.
Believe that. He's the one who brings light. When everything around us is night, when all hope is lost, He brings back hope.
Christmas demonstrates that truth so well, because in that first Christmas, God set His Son as Immanuel. The word means God with us. God is still with us in this year of loss and violence, division and pandemic. God is with us in our own long, dark alleys. In 2020, God is still weaving His sovereign tapestry to accomplish His divine will. Don't overlook Him. Whatever dark valley you're enduring, Jesus is still Immanuel. God is still sovereign.
He is able to carry out His plan when we can't see it. This Christmas, would you please join Insight for Living Ministries in proclaiming this calming reassurance worldwide? You can do so by sending your generous donation before December 31.
Would you do that? Your much-needed gift will bring light to others who, this very day, are stumbling through a dark alley of fear, disappointment, discouragement and depression. They need to know, as Moses said to the Israelites in their moments of terror, do not be afraid. Do not panic, for the Lord your God will personally go ahead of you. He will neither fail you nor abandon you. I'm counting on you for your gift. Thanks very much. And here's how to respond. To give a donation online, go directly to insight.org slash donate. If you're using the convenient Insight for Living mobile app, just click on the donate button and follow the simple instructions. To give a contribution by phone, call us if you're listening in the U.S., dial 1-800-772-8888.
You know, some in our world feel all alone, afraid, uncertain about the future. And yet, with your help, we can tell them the best news ever. So please, if you're listening in the United States, call 1-800-772-8888. Or you can also give online at insight.org. Chuck Swindoll continues his message called Let's Hear God's Voice in a Baby's Cry, Thursday on Insight for Living. The preceding message, Let's Hear God's Voice in a Baby's Cry, was copyrighted in 2019 and 2020, and the sound recording was copyrighted in 2020 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.
