And the shepherds
returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and
seen, as it was told unto them.
Luke 2:20
Faith is belief before
sight. Faith is conviction about what God says before confirmation through what
God shows. Our faith is tested, tried in fire. Peter writes that believers are
priests and we know that God will purify the sons of Levi. He refines us like
gold is refined. We each have our seasons of burning.
The testing
necessarily includes some kind of disappointment. We hope things will go one
way, we pray accordingly but the thing we didn't want prevails. The great thing
is to be sure the disappointment is not degraded to the point of doubt or even
despair, to the place where faith begins to break upon the rocks.
If nothing we ever
learned from God's Word ever appeared to be true in our experience few of us
would have remained Christians very long. But what God says about the world,
about history, about the way people are as they abide in their respective
spheres of belief and unbelief, is more than enough to shelter faith when the
test comes. That and the overwhelming sense that, like the Hebrew children in
Babylon, we are not alone in the furnace.
The elapsed time
between what the Shepherds heard and what the Shepherds saw was short. The time
was made even shorter because they made haste and searched out God's promises
without delay. Not a bad model for ourselves.
We are not likely to
be favored with a vision of angels. The privilege of the Shepherds was
enormous. They worked in the right neighborhood at the right time. But they
doubtless knew their trials in after-years. Perhaps trials which even made them
doubt the reality or the relevance of what they saw that night.
But it WAS real.
And it remains
eternally relevant.
The elapsed time in
our own case will be longer for sure. But our prospect is just as sure.
Like them, we shall
behold Him.
No longer lying in a
manger but seated upon a throne.
The shepherds will be
there too.
Still glorifying and
praising God.
Merry Christmas from
Memphis
