"Poor people ate their donkey. Only the wealthy used it as transportation."
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“(C. Thomas) Anderson says Jesus couldn’t have been poor because he received lucrative gifts — gold, frankincense and myrrh — at birth. Jesus had to be wealthy because the Roman soldiers who crucified him gambled for his expensive undergarments. Even Jesus’ parents, Mary and Joseph, lived and traveled in style, he says.”
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10 Things You Probably Didn't Know about "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing"
First appeared in The Baptist Bulletin, December, 2007
1. The original song was published as “Hark, How All the Welkin Rings” in the 1739 Wesley hymnal, Hymns and Sacred Poems. The second line, as written by Charles Wesley, read “Glory to the King of kings,” not “Glory to the newborn King.” And he originally wrote “Universal nature say,” not “Sons of men and angels sing.”
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The Incarnation and Birth of Christ - C. H. Spurgeon
Delivered Sunday Morning, December 23rd, 1855, by the Rev. C.H. Spurgeon at New Park Street Chapel, Southwark.
“But thou, Beth-lehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting” (Micah 5:2).
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The First Christmas: Why Did God's Son Come to Planet Earth?
Is there anything special about planet Earth that God the Father would send His Son, Jesus Christ the Lord, through Whom the universe was created (John 1:3), all the way down from the third heaven to this tiny speck in the ocean of space?
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Christmas Greetings from Jim Peet
We were awakened by a call at 5:43 AM on Thursday, December 10th. It was my Sister-in-law from Cincinnati. As Kathee fumbled for the phone in the dark, I was asking myself, “Who died?” Sadly, it was my 32 year old nephew who had died suddenly and unexpectedly of an aortic aneurysm. 38 months earlier we had been in Helen Georgia at his wedding and on December 14th we went to Gainesville Georgia for his funeral. Sad event indeed! As I viewed his open coffin, I thought about the tremendous hope of the resurrection and the link between our Lord’s incarnation and that hope. This is reflected in Wesley’s “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.”
| Hail the heav’nly Prince of Peace! Hail the Sun of Righteousness! Light and life to all He brings, Ris’n with healing in His wings. Mild He lays His glory by, Born that man no more may die. Born to raise the sons of earth, |
Even His name speaks of that hope: “And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name JESUS, for He will save His people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Peter expounded on the linkage between His resurrection and the believer’s own future resurrection: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you” (1 Peter 1:3-4).
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