Christmas Moments - #7 WHERE ARE YOU CHRISTMAS

Where are you, Christmas? Why can't I find you? Why have you gone away? Think about Luke chapter 2.

That's what we always do, Christmas season. You've read it a million times, I hope. You've pondered it many times. You've seen it with fresh eyes. But in the 18th and 19th verses of the story, it reads like this. It says all those who heard were amazed at these things the shepherds told them. They were all amazed, right? Everybody was amazed. But, and then there's this but, but Mary treasured all these things, pondering them in her heart.

Now, I was thinking about it this morning. How would Luke know that? How would he know that everybody else was amazed, but Mary pondered these things in her heart? Unless, perhaps, Luke got the Christmas story from Mary, right? She lived in Ephesus up there on the mountain with John. There, as the church was functioning, Luke was clearly there. He had a chance to talk to her. Do you suppose that the reason that Mary's genealogy comes in the third chapter there, or Mary's genealogies in the book of Luke, do you suppose that Mary shared these things with Luke?

And that's how he knew that she had pondered them and treasured them in her heart. So I began to, and I began to ask God, what does this mean? Where are we going? Take me on this treasure hunt.

What is it? Help me put this together. And he kept on telling me, God, go study, Robbie, go study the ark. Go back and study the ark. And I've studied the ark I don't know how many times, but I was just like, okay, I love the ark. Let me go back and study it. And I'd studied it with fresh eyes. And I went and I looked at the Hebrew word for ark there, not the ark that Noah got in, but the ark of the covenant is A-R-O-W-N. And come to find out, it had a fresh meaning I had never really perceived or thought about before, and it means a treasure chest of gathered fruit in a way.

Now what? It was certainly a treasure chest. You've seen the pictures of it. It was golden. It had, inside of it, you might remember, it had the manna and it had the rod that budded. Well, the rod that budded was an almond branch, and the almond branch is the first fruits that bud in that area of the world. And so, yeah, that has to do with fruit, and so does manna.

But the law, now that one's kind of, that one's still throwing me a little bit, but I thought about it. Now wait a minute. Mary treasured all these things in her ark where she meets with God, right? That's where Moses met with God was there at the ark in the mercy seat.

You know the story. Well, we get to meet with God at Christmas, and as we begin to ponder these things this Christmas, I'm hoping that you will ponder with me what fruit have you seen that God has done this year? What fruit have you seen in this season? Obviously, we get to ponder the Christmas story and all those things in our heart, too, and I hope you're pondering those fresh. But as we do, God's manifested himself in so many different ways.