Luke 2:7

Luke 2:7

Christ waiting to find room.

In the birth and birthplace of Jesus there is something beautifully correspondent with His personal fortunes, afterwards also of the fortunes of His Gospel. Even down to our own age and times He comes into the world, as it were, to the taxing, and there is scant room for Him even at that.

I. The reason why Jesus cannot find room for His Gospel is closely analogous to that which He encountered in His birth viz. that men's hearts are preoccupied. They do not care, in general, to put any indignity on Christ; they would prefer not to do it; but they are filled to the full with their own subjects already.

II. If we speak of what is called Christendom, comprising, as it does, all the most civilised and powerful nations of mankind, those most forward in learning, and science, and art, and commerce, it may well enough seem to us when they fix the name Christendom Christ dominion on these great powers of the earth, that Christ has certainly gotten room, so far, to enter and be glorified in human society. And it is a very great thing, doubtless, for Christ to be so far admitted to His kingly honours; more, however, as a token of what will sometime appear than as a measure of power already exerted. Still, what multitudes of outlying populations there are that have never heard of Him. And the states and populations that acknowledge Him, how little of Christ, take them all together, appears to be really in them. Now and then a saint appears, a real Christly man, but the general mass are sharp for money and dull to Christ.

III. Our Gospel fails hitherto of all its due honours, because we so poorly represent the worth and largeness of it. What multitudes are there under the name of disciples, who maintain a Christian figure securely up to the line of common respect penurious, little, mean, sordid, foul in their imaginations, low-minded, coarse-minded every way! The work, however fitly ordered as respects the machinery, lingers till Christ gets room to be a more complete inspiration in His followers. They give Him the stable, when they ought to be giving Him the inn.

H. Bushnell, Christ and His Salvation,p. 1.

So, by the ordering of Providence, that fell out at Bethlehem which was to foreshadow all that has happened since. "He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not."

I. At Bethlehem it was but an ordinary accident. The very limited means of accommodation in a poor village had been extended as far as they would go. Those who came first would be first served, and those who could pay the best would be most carefully attended to. The travellers were not bidden to go elsewhere; they were not left in the street to seek lodging on a winter's night; what could not be found in the house might, since nothing better could be offered, be found in an outhouse. And so the Saviour of the world was born in a stable, and cradled in a manger.

II. What occurred then undesignedly has been repeated of deliberate intention ever since. That inn at Bethlehem was the type and similitude, to a greater or less degree, of every human heart that has ever beaten since. Who is there but must be constrained to own that while his heart has been swept and garnished for other guests, and all its chambers filled, the poorest, narrowest, least-honoured place about it has been allotted to Jesus? The lamentable but plain truth is this, that from first to last the world which He has made has found no room for God.

III. Let us try to realise who it is that knocks at our hearts, and for whom we are unwilling or careless to find room. It is the majesty and awfulness of the Guest that seeks admission the awfulness of such an Indwelling Presence the restraints which it involves and lays upon us which cause us to shrink from the contemplation of it, and to share the feeling of the Apostle when he exclaimed, "Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord!" But is He to seek admission, and are we so say that we have "no room?" That be far from us! Let us welcome Him without reserve, and His love and grace will do the rest.

F. E. Paget, Helps and Hindrances to the Christian Life,vol. i., p. 30.

References: Luke 2:7. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., p. 343; Church of England Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 13; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. ii., p. 520; vol. iii., p. 333; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. viii., No. 485; E. J. Hardy, Faint yet Pursuing,p. 151; J. Keble, Sermons from Christmas to Epiphany,p. 97; H. Wonnacott, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xiv., p. 24.