Come to My Heart
Emily E. Elliot (1864)
Thou didst
leave thy throne and thy kingly crown,
When thou
camest to earth for me,
But in
Bethlehem’s home there was found no room,
For thy holy
nativity.
O Come to my
heart, Lord Jesus,
There is room
in my heart for thee
The theme is a common one in literature, fairy tales and
film – the prince lives in the guise of a pauper, or the child born to royalty
is hidden among commoners or under a spell.
In the 21st century kid’s film genre, there is even a Barbie
movie where the princess and the popstar change places. In the movies it’s a
fun experiment, but the stakes were tremendously higher in the sacred drama of
the incarnation.
The
willingness to exchange the throne of heaven for a life of rejection and sorrow
on earth is the hard-to-believe part of the gospel from a human
perspective. Why would the Almighty God
of the universe send his son to a time and place where he wouldn’t be received
as deity? As written in the gospel of
John, “He was in the world, and though the world was made
through him, the world did not recognize him. He came
to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him” (John 1:10-11).
From our human view, we can’t
understand why this would have to be.
Why was there no room in the inn, why was the son of God despised and
rejected? No, we can’t fathom why God
would choose this for his only son. We
can only accept with gratitude the gift that it was – and is - to us. Because, as John continues to tell us, “Yet
to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the
right to become children of God” (John 1:12).
That is the wonder, the amazing grace of the incarnation.
Prayer Focus:
the incarnation
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