PUSH BUTTONS
Your King In Sight
Merry Christmas to you, friends. What a joy it is to celebrate the birth of Jesus again. Colossians 1:27 tells us that Christ in You (Us) is the Hope (expectation) of glory. We can thus say that the celebration and reminder that this day brings is also the reminder of the birth of that glory in each and every one of us.
One of the things I love to do, particularly in this season, is re-visit the Christmas story. Luke 2 and Matthew 2 lay out two events around the birth of Jesus and the announcement of it. As I read through both chapters and narratives, I found salient lessons worth gleaning from both events.
The first glaring narrative we see in Luke 2 is that a King was about to be born, but there was no room for the King to be born in the Inn, the obvious place to welcome Royalty. However, the King had to be born anyway, obviously, Mary’s belly was no longer cozy for the King. So they gave birth to the King in a manger, in the company of mooing cows, the table prepared before them wasn’t a feast but cattle food.
The import of this is that often times, the way we desire to birth or establish the hope we carry may not always align with what reality affords in the present, but we can start anyway. Never let the stark difference between the idealistic picture of your future and the constraining reality of your present immobilise you or deny you from starting. The future you envision will continue to be a dream if you don’t start today. There comes a time when there’s agitation for the King in you to be born, and there might not be a room in the Inn, but there’s room in the manger. Birth the King anyway!
The second narrative was that at Jesus’ birth, two announcements went out to two groups of people; First, the Shepherds (Luke 2) and The Wise Men (Matthew 2), about two years later. I find two things quite instructive. The first is the group of people the announcement came to. The announcement of the King was contingent upon the visitation of first, the Shepherds and secondly, Wisemen.
The import of this is that the interaction with first, a shepherding factor and secondly, a wisdom factor is crucial to the emergence of the glory within us. Over the past year, one of the things that has been needfully emphasised in our church is the primary place of the Word of God (Shepherd Dimension) in ushering us into our divine realities and that our full and fine emergence is at the behest of the interaction of the Word and the earth in application (Wiseman Dimension). The introduction of our King of Kings lends credence to these lessons.
The second insight we glean from this narrative is the nature of the announcement that came to each group. The Wisemen saw a star, the Shepherds got the detail.
The Shepherd got the full picture, they were told about a King they would visit in a manger. Shepherds know you are a King, but your King might still be in a manger, and they go about announcing the King you are anyway. This taught me that there’s no use pretending to your Shepherds. They call the King out even when the King is still in a manger, covered by realities that do not look like the King you carry inside. That’s why, when you look at the Word what you’ll always see is that perfect man.
Theologians have it that the Wisemen’s visit was two years after Jesus was born. The Wisemen, having seen the star, presumptuously headed to King Herod’s Palace to look for the King, evidencing what their expectation was.
Seeing that the King wasn’t where they had presumptuously thought, the Wisemen followed the star to lead them to Jesus. Getting to the house, the situation of his birth was so distant to their expectation of what the star portended.
Even though these events may have happened two years apart, one narrative straddles both. The reality they experienced fell short of the prophecy they saw or heard, but they exalted the prophecy above the situation.
The Magis, at the sight of Jesus being rocked in an ordinary house, didn’t turn back with their gifts in disappointment, they presented the gifts they brought anyway. The Shepherds went about announcing the birth of the born King anyway.
They kept the King in sight. The vision of the King they saw before them was strong enough to drown the situation they found the King in. The present sight of the baby in a manger surrounded by domestic animals with a pungent stench of stables wasn’t sufficient to distract from the King within. Neither was the underwhelming view of a house compared to the magnificent expectation of a palatial residence.
Christ is the hope of glory in all of us. That glory shines in me and in you. Keep your glorious King within in sight. Speak about Him, surround yourself with people that will present Him gifts. Don’t shroud your King in the transient realities of present struggles, because soon they’ll give way to that glorious reality within.
Merry Christmas and Happy holidays!
Have a beautiful rest of the week!
For His Glory and His Renown
@layinkadebayo
Olayinka Adebayo
Push Buttons is a weekly devotional of The Powerpoint Tribe.
