Have you ever thought about what it would be like to meet baby Jesus? What would your reaction be? Would you ooh and aah over the smallness and the preciousness of Him? Would you weep as you held the incarnate Lord? Would you speechlessly observe and take weeks to process what you witnessed? Would you marvel at the sheer wonder and beauty of the moment, as you met the God of heaven and earth, finally come to be with His people?

My daughter is learning to self-soothe when she goes to sleep. If she wakes up when we drop her in her crib, or if she wakes in the middle of the night, she tends to cry. But weeks ago, she cried for a long period of time, now she’s starting to only cry for a minute at most. Somehow, she's developing that ability to calm down and go back to sleep.

I remember being a kid and feeling that uneasy feeling of laying awake in your bed and not being able to fall asleep. At some point, I learned at school that Jesus’ name has the power to drive out fear, and I decided to apply it to that creepy feeling that something will come crawling out of the shadows in your dark room. I started to just say aloud, into the darkness the name of Jesus. Even now when that feeling comes over me I do the same thing. And always, without fail, I instantly feel a calm come over me, driving out my fear.

Could you imagine being Zecharias? He encountered an angel in the temple that told him he was going to be a father in his old age. His first reaction was doubt and he lost his voice as a result. This rendered him a mute for the entirety of his wife’s pregnancy; and as he watched the evidence of this miracle grow within his wife– the very proof he asked the angel for when he found out about his son– he was unable to rejoice in it with his words. During Elizabeth’s delivery, Zecharias could not offer her words of comfort or encouragement. In the first days of John’s life, Zecharias watched God’s marvelous plan unfolding in real time, in the midst of it and yet somehow sidelined at the same time.

For most, not being able to speak would be a severe punishment. Not being able to speak in the middle of a miracle would be even harder. And for Zechariah? He was about to experience the miracle of his lifetime. If you know about having a baby, you know that when it comes time to tell people you’re expecting, it’s some of the most exciting news to share with others. It’s news you’re bursting to give. And if you’ve experienced years and years of wanting a child, living through all the anticipation turned disappointment as time marched on well past the time where it was possible, then the news that a baby is finally on its way is incredible.

When the radio crackled out its first broadcast on Christmas Eve in 1906, listeners tuned in to the voice of Reginald Fessenden reading Luke 2– the birth of Christ– before he picked up his violin and played “O Holy Night.” Yes, that’s right. The first song played on the radio, after years of exclusively morse code, was a hymn depicting the birth of Jesus. The song was written in French as a poem originally by Placide Cappeau in 1843 and set to music by Adolphe Charles Adams for a Christmas Eve mass in 1847. Although the church accepted and loved the hymn at first, it was eventually banned after leadership found out that Adolphe was Jewish and Placide walked away from his faith. Eventually, about a decade later, the hymn would fall into the hands of an American minister, John Sullivan Dwight, who would change some of the lyrics to be the ones we know today.

Picture this: The world seems to hold its breath and is eerily still. The wind whips through cold, damp trenches as the minutes tick into the wee hours of the morning. The year is 1914 and you are a soldier in the army holding down the western front against the Germans in World War I. The war began earlier that year at the beginning of the summer, and has been relentless ever since. If you were crazy enough to poke your head out of the trench to look across No Man’s Land, the bodies laying out in the cold would be staggering– a fresh dusting of snow being their only burial shroud. You miss your family, your hometown, and your own warm bed. It almost seems like a lifetime away as you sit at the bottom of this trench, the soil packed hard and unforgiving. You count the days since you’ve been here when it occurs to you; it’s Christmas Eve.

Today, we begin with a laugh: Sam was scrolling through Twitter a few nights ago and started to chuckle. When I asked him what was so funny, he told me that someone asked via tweet, “Who is Harold Angel?” Of course, this person would be confusing Mr. Harold Angel with the opening line of the same Christmas hymn called, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” The lyrics were originally written by Charles Wesley as a poem and later put to music by George Whitfield in 1753, when the original first line– Hark, how the welkin (heaven) rings– was revised to what we know and love today. What strikes most historians about this hymn is the lyrics; not only are they theologically sound, but they are beautifully put. In three stanzas, this song presents the Gospel in a meaningful and succinct way, which is probably why it has stood the test of time– almost 300 years to be exact.

Over the last month, we’ve been picking apart Psalm 23, one of the most recognizable passages of scripture there is. David, the author of the psalm was a king, a shepherd, a son, but most importantly, a man that was passionately invested in a relationship with God. If anyone understood the deep nuances of every line of this psalm, it was David himself. If there was anyone qualified to compare God to a shepherd, it was David.In six, short verses, we were taken through the green pastures and still waters of a life laid in submission to the Lord; a life that allows God to lead and take care of our needs. From there, we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, an ominous valley surrounded by the trials of life on all sides. Then, we sit down at a table prepared by the Lord, but a table set in a room full of our enemies, an oasis of comfort and rest in the middle of a not-so-wonderful situation.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. It’s such a short sentence, but it is a powerful picture of the Christian walk. I’m sure you’ve been there, because we all have. We all have enemies. And sometimes, our enemy isn’t a person. Sometimes our enemy is something completely unseen that tucks itself up to the table and stares us down, waiting for us to blink. Depression. Anxiety. Fear. Unemployment. Infertility. Disappointment. Lost dreams. Low self esteem and body issues. Grief. Intimidation. Disease. The list can go on and on.

Up until now, Psalm 23 has painted pleasant, calming, peaceful images of belonging to Jesus. This week, things take a turn into some darker, more treacherous territory. Suddenly, we go from green, rolling, lush pastures and still, glassy, crystal water to the valley of the shadow of death; a place that conjures up a picture of a dark, rocky, unforgiving canyon that imposes on all sides. We all know this valley. We’ve all been here before, in fact, some might argue that all of life is a walk through the valley of the shadow of death. That could be true, since all of life is lived in the inevitable shadow of death, felt more keenly on some days than others.

This week, let’s continue on into the following verses, which are deep with vivid imagery. The Lord is our shepherd. He makes us lie down in green pastures, He leads us beside still waters. He refreshes us and leads us along paths of righteousness. When I was a kid, memorizing these verses, I pictured my Papa’s house in the mountains of New York. His house was at the top of a hill, surrounded by woods, and at the bottom of the hill was a little stream and an apple grove. Everything about it was green and beautiful to my childhood imagination.

We’ve been at this for many years: since August of 2017. Over the years, Christmas has become an ever-increasing difficult topic to unpack over and over. Each year, I worry about how I can make it different, and put it in a slightly different vein than the years before. And I’ll admit, some of our Christmas devotions are my absolute favorite; finding completely new things to make Christmas and God brand new all over again. So this year, I was concerned over how I’d be able to pull it off all over again. And then I thought: Why not take a non-Christmas passage and relate it back to the Christmas story. So, for the next few weeks, I’d like to experiment with you and see what we can discover together by taking Psalm 23– one of the most recognized and culturized passages of scripture– and see if we can view it through the lens of Jesus’ birth to see anything new.

Jesus’ birth was no accident; that’s something we’ve been really driving home over the past few weeks. His arrival was foretold in the Old Testament numerous times in psalms and songs, from prophets, and from God Himself. And since everything from his lineage, to the place and circumstances of Jesus’ birth were already in scripture, we could be sure that when it actually happened, we’d have the ability to check and prove that this birth was the arrival of the Messiah God had promised us. Without this foreshadowing, we might have accepted any liar that wanted to masquerade and exploit themselves as the promise of God.

When I was a kid, I was always confused as to why Jesus was considered a part of Joseph’s bloodline. I mean, Jesus and Joseph shared no physical blood. Jesus was conceived with no participation from Joseph, so how could the Bible claim Jesus as a part of Joseph’s lineage?

Over the past six months, I’ve touched a few times on how we can see God the Father alluding to Jesus and the coming cross over and over again throughout the Old Testament. The first we see it is in Genesis 3, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” Or when we focused on Genesis 15, where God made the old covenant with Abram as groundwork for the new covenant that Jesus’ blood would afford us.

The holidays are busy, and the busiest day of them all is Christmas Eve. Today, we have one last opportunity to wrap (or buy) those gifts, clean ourselves up, and get to whatever family gathering we’re going to. For some, this might be all on top of a full workday. To make matters even more frantic, we had one less week this year with Thanksgiving being set so far back.