Happy Christmas Day and welcome to the first of these '12 Blogs of Christmas'.
If you can join us, we'd love to see you at our 10am Christmas Day service at Woodgreen Church this morning.
For this special day, a thought from John Stott about the staggering truth of the incarnation and what it teaches us about the dignity of depending on God.
Critics of Christianity sometimes call it a 'crutch for weak people'.
But the incarnation shows us that there is nothing demeaning in depending on God.
Christmas reminds us that the most appropriate way to respond the God who made us to know him, is to depend totally on him.
'Christ himself
takes on the dignity of dependence. He is born a baby, totally dependent on the
care of his mother. He needs to be fed, he needs his bottom to be wiped, he
needs to be propped up when he rolls over. And yet he never loses his divine
dignity. And, at the end, on the cross, he again becomes totally dependent,
limbs pierced and stretched, unable to move. So in the person of Christ we
learn that depedence does not, cannot, deprive a person of their dignity, of
their supreme worth. And if dependence was appropriate for the God of the
universe, it is certainly appropriate for us.'
John Stott, The
Radical Disciple, p.113.
