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December 23, 2008
Luke 1: 57-66 “Ready or Not, Here I Come”
Are you ready? Are you ready for Christmas? Are people asking you that
question? The real answer for me is No. Heck no. Not yet, and probably
not if I had another month to get ready. If you could peek into my home
you would find laundry undone, paperwork in a pile on the kitchen
counter, presents not yet wrapped in the back of the closet. No, I’m not
ready for Christmas. Worse yet, my heart is not ready. Am I caught up
with my Bible reading, have I spent even 5 minutes in prayer today? If you
peeked into the dark corners there, you would uncover some things I
would rather not have you see. We are messy people with messy lives and
we fill the pews of our churches and the streets of our towns and we make
up a fallen world.
The Good News, The GREAT News, is that our loving God knows all that.
He didn’t wait until Mary and Joseph were married and had built a nice
house down the road from her parents. He sent Jesus to a manger, in a
stable, to an unwed mother, in a messy Bethlehem. He sent Him to a Jewish
nation who had been waiting and watching, but when it happened,
they weren’t ready. And some of us are still so busy getting ready that we
will miss it all together.
So, stop. Stop getting ready for a minute and just sit. And smile. And say
thank you. To a God who sent Jesus to find us in the middle of our messy
lives, who says “Ready or not, here I come”. We don’t need to be ready.
The Good News of Jesus can’t wait. Our messy world needs to hear it. And
like the shepherds, let us drop whatever we are doing and tell someone
Today.
Prayer:
And you, beneath life’s crushing load, Whose forms are bending low, Who
toil along the climbing way With painful steps and slow: Look now, for glad
and golden hours Come swiftly on the wing. Oh, rest beside your weary road,
and hear the angels sing.It Came Upon a Midnight Clear v.3
Kathy Rockey, messy Christian, wife of Pastor Jonathan Rockey, mother,
grandmother, nurse, St. John Lutheran Church, Palmer Alaska
Beginning November 30th and going through Christmas Day, this page will feature a daily devotion from the New Advent deotional booklet "COME LORD JESUS". Each devotion is written by a Pastor or Church worker in the Alaska Circuit of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod with a special Christmas Day devotion written by the Northwest District President, Rev. Warren Schumacher. Bookmark this page for a devotion a day!.
Download the devotional booklet in PDF form HERE
TO PRINT:
- The layout of the PDF file is designed to be easiest for printing the booklets.
- The layout is designed for 2-sided printing. If your printer does this automatically AWESOME! If not, you can do what I did and print all the odd pages, then flip them over and do the even pages. I did it as a test-run and it was no problem.
- Color idea: To give the devotions a little splash of color we used a light purple cover because that is the color Zion uses for Advent. Of course many Churches use blue and that would look great, too.
- Zion is planning on passing them out after Church this Sunday (November 30th) since that is the beginning of Advent.
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