The Scene at Bethlehem

The birth of Jesus at Bethlehem, Judea, was the greatest scene this world has ever experienced. It altered the course of history and can change the course of your life as well. At Bethlehem, God gave His only Son to be the answer for every need and desire of the human heart.

The first silent night was charged with action as celestial messengers from another world carried out their assignments in preparing for the spectacular happening that would change the world.

Ignoring the kings in the plush palaces, the Pharisees in their pious prayers, they announced the birth of the world’s Saviour to common shepherds reclining beside their open fires on the Judean hillside. “There has been born for you a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.”

The message of the Christmas scene contradicts all who would declare that God if He exists at all, has turned a deaf ear and an empty hand to the painful plight of man today. The christ child of Bethlehem’s manger tells the world loud and clear that God has heard the cry of every lonely and perplexed soul.

That prisoner pacing his cell on death row receives the joyous news; “There has been born for you a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.” Jesus gives him the opportunity to begin life anew—eternal life in glory.

The young girl lying in her hospital bed with cancer writing “finished” to her life’s dreams and ambitions finds new hope, new life, as she too hears the message “There has been born for you a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.”

In an east-end rooming house of a prairie city, there is a small dingy and dirty basement room. A seventeen-year-old high school dropout is lying on a mangled mattress. He is a slave of drugs. Soon his master will compel him to leave the meager shelter of his room to get another fix.

He will go, he lacks the power to say no. His future, his world lies shattered and broken around him, until he hears the message of the angels. “There has been born for you a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.” In Jesus he finds forgiveness, and power beyond himself to be freed from his slavery to habits. Free to live again!

In a university library across town, a first-year art student’s mind strays from his textbook. There is a driving demand in his soul to find answers to life—his life. His studies are failing to answer the reason and purpose of life, why he is a living being, why he is in this university studying…studying and preparing for what?

Next birthday he will be twenty. No longer a teen-ager. An adult, expected to take his place in an adult world. A world that to him is shrouded in a fog the leaves values vaguely defined, obscures goals giving him the feeling of being detached from reality.

Life seems a mockery, with himself the object of a cruel joke. But light dawns over his soul, the fog is pushed back and a new horizon appears with the massage from a higher dimension, from God who knows and cares about his plight. “There has been born for you a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.”

The message of the manger is the good news that there is a God who knows and cares for all mankind. He cares for you. God so loved you, no matter where you are, what you are, or what you have done; that He gave His only begotten Son to be your Saviour so that you might have life and have it more abundantly. Jesus is declared by God to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life—to all who will come to Him. O come, let us adore Him!

He’s the Saviour of your soul!