Dear family and friends of WCPC:

 I trust your Advent season is full of growing excitement and anticipation.  A number of years ago I came across “If Jesus Had Not Come” by Paul Rees of World Vision.  I thought you might enjoy it.

 See you Sunday,

 Your pastor,

 David Jones

 

“If I had not come…”

That’s the way Jesus began one of His sentences.  The Haunting suggestiveness of it is overpowering.  The smug Complacency with which I have come to take Christmas for Granted is suddenly seized and shattered.   Gone in a trice, a Million cheery lights and merry laughs.

 Suppose Christ had not come.  Suppose there had Been…

     No manger birth

      No star in the east

       No angel rhapsody

        No awe-struck shepherds

         No Sermon on the Mount

          No Healer of hurts and hearts

           No reconciling Cross

            No empty tomb

             No empowering Spirit

              No community of the caring…

 

If Jesus had not come, our thinking about God would have gone along gropingly, forever faltering, forever fractured. For is it not Jesus who, practically as well as conceptually,

Invests God with love, the universe with meaning, and life with immeasurably glorious possibilities?

If Jesus had not come!  What mind can compass the Immensity of the gap, the vastness of the void, that would Have been created in the human story?

     History without its fairest Figure

      Literature without its sublimest passages

       Eloquence without its loftiest flights

        Theology without its Christology

          Serventhood for others without its model and Motive

           The world without a Redeemer

             Death without a Destroyer

              Heaven without assurance or allure…

Ah!  But I remember another word of His…“I am come!”   My word, what a difference!

He has come…

     To Mary’s encircling arms

      To the shepherds wondering gaze

       To Jerusalem’s pools and pathways

        To the classy rich and cashless poor

         To the arrogant, the ignorant, the errant

           To the resolute, the dissolute, the prostitute.

There has never been a coming like it.  (Yes, there will be another, but even it will not be like this one.)

      More than an effort, it was an effect.

       More than an attempt, it was an act.

        More than a desire, it was a deed.

         To reveal to suffer, to die, to live again.

          To enlighten our darkness,

           To liberate us from our Chains,

            To save us from ourselves,

             To bring us to God and to Mankind and to heaven.

That’s why He came!  That’s why He is here!

                                                                                                                                                  Paul Rees