Lord we blame the innkeeper for only giving you the stablewhen his inn was full but what about all the others who lived in Bethlehem that nightwhen you were born. Why were all their houses that weren’t full of guests fast closed against the one who contained you? God bless our little homes this Christmastime make them big enough to welcome you contained in those for whom the world has no room excepta cold and lonely Christmas day.
—Joseph Bayly in Psalms of My Life; calligraphy by Tim Botts
God’s richest gifts
Pain is pain and sorrow is sorrow. It hurts. It limits. It impoverishes. It isolates. It restrains. It works devastation deep within the personality. It circumscribes in a thousand different ways. There is nothing good about it. But the gifts God can give with it are the richest the human spirit can know.
—Margaret Clarkson in The Banner (Nov. 19, 1984)
Hard to believe
All men matter. You matter. I matter. It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe.
—G.K. Chesterton in The Father Brown Omnibus
Jesus, our divine ladder
We are not to ascend the study of the divine majesty before we have adequately understood this little infant. We are to ascend into heaven by that ladder which is placed before us, using those steps which God prepared and used.… The Son of God does not want to be seen and found in heaven. Therefore he descended from heaven to this earth and came to us in our flesh. He placed himself in the womb of his mother, in her lap, and on the cross. And this is the ladder by which we are to ascend to God.
—Martin Luther in Luther’s Works
Only follow Christ
We want to evangelize like D. L. Moody, pray like George Mueller, preach like Charles Swindoll, counsel like James Dobson, have her administrative abilities and his staff. But Christ keeps saying to me and to you, “What is that to you, really? You follow me.”
—Richard G. Mylander in The Covenant Companion (July 1988)
Christmas myth or reality?
A pageant whose core is an infant and a mother, can’t help but call up a nation’s, even a world’s primal longing and remembrance around its own early childhood experience. It isn’t surprising that the world is drawn to this season with such passion and ritual.
[But] have we created a [Christmas] myth to cover the reality; a myth to satisfy our own needs? A myth so powerful that the mystery and wonder of the Incarnation is all but lost and as a result, we are depressed.
Evangelism is witness. It is one beggar telling another beggar where to get food. The Christian does not offer out of his bounty. He has no bounty. He is simply a guest at his Master’s table and, as evangelist, he calls others too.
—Daniel T. Niles in That They May Have Life
Incarnation
He undertook to help the descendants of Abraham, fashioning a body for himself from a woman and sharing our flesh and blood, to enable us to see in him not only God, but also, by reason of this union, a man like ourselves.
—Cyril of Alexandria, quoted in The Wisdom of the Saints
Misplaced veneration
Many Christians set their sights too low. They tend to deify men, and no man can measure up to that.
—Paul Harvey, broadcast of March 25, 1987, reprinted in the Charlotte Observer (Mar. 27, 1987)
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