What Will This Child Be?

 

  There is nothing quite like standing over the crib of a newborn baby. All the hope and potential lying there wrapped in a blanket. I’ve been here long enough to have gotten to visit several of our young people on their first days and as I look at them now I see how great they have fulfilled that promise.  Yet that isn’t always the case

  I often think about people that guilty of great atrocities, what their parents hoped for on the first day they held them? Surely they didn’t foresee what their bundle of joy would become.  How sad to think that child could grow up to do so much damage to the world.

  When those shepherds came upon the child whose crib was a manger so long ago, they had a completely different perceptive. You see they had been told from an utmost reliable source that this kid wasn’t going to harm the world but save it.

But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people;  for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. "This will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger."

Luke 2:10-12 

  I can’t imagine what was going through their minds as they look down on that precious child. How could one so small, so innocent, so ordinary, do so much? Yet after what they had seen in heard in their field, they knew it must be so.

  God’s power is shown in a great many things. The spectacular displays in nature, the vast reaches of the cosmos, the intricate complexity of life. Yet the most amazing thing he ever did was to place a child in the little village of Bethlehem with the promise to save the world.