Crossing the desert to seek the child
Adventure stories from days of old and the trail blazers from history still fascinate me. Lewis and Clark were commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson to cross the uncharted parts of North America to the Pacific Ocean. I’m fascinated with their very young native Indian young girl guide Sacajawea that helped guide and negotiate on that land crossing. Christopher Columbus was sent by the King of Spain to try to cross the unknown and uncharted Atlantic Ocean. Marco Polo crossed vast expanses of Asia to discover new trade routes and come across unknown tribes of people in that ‘undiscovered’ and undocumented land. Yuri Gagarin the Russia Cosmonaut was the first human to be shot up into space which opened all the space travel we now know. I even love to think about the brave unnamed people groups that crossed the ‘Bering Sea land bridge’ a few thousand years ago that was the beginning of the native tribes that inhabited North and South America. The list could easily go on… David Livingstone the central African Missionary Explorer; Ernest Shackelton the Antarctic Explorer; Daniel Boone across the Appalachians; Alexander the Great the Macedonian king and adventurer; and many, many more.
What about the Wise Men at the birth of Jesus story? Were they explorers too? This group of explorers crossed a vast and harsh desert landscape to follow a star and find this ‘King of the Jews.’ The Wise Men in the Christmas birth story of Jesus are prominent in every manger scene that we have. But do we really grasp the whole story and some of the major aspects of their significance?
This coming Sunday we are taking a final look at the whole Christmas series that we’ve called “What Child is This?” And the focus is going to be on the passage in Matthew 2:1-12. Before you come to worship this Sunday, I urge you to read through this story and ponder it. Why in the world would this group of well off, seemingly prominent scholarly and intelligent ‘Magi’ cross a vast and empty desert to seek a child? What child was this and was it worth that kind of journey? To get a greater understanding of the full story you really need to read all of Matthew chapter 2. To fully grasp the Wise Men adventure story, you need to become familiar with the parts about Herod, the genocide of baby boys, the fleeing to Egypt, and Mary and Joseph’s eventual return back to Nazareth where they raised Jesus.
We will look at this together this coming Sunday, our first Sunday of the new calendar year. And by the way, we will also get to celebrate some baptisms as we ring in the New Year.
I’ll see you Sunday morning. Happy New Year LifeWay family!
