When God announced the birth of Jesus to the world, he didn’t send Jesus to CNN or ABC News, but sent the angelic host of Heaven to a common field outside Bethlehem. And the people he chose as his spokesmen were unpolished, sweaty, uncouth shepherds. The gospel writer Luke makes sure we know that the shepherds didn’t waste time gazing into the Bethlehem sky, but they “made haste,” to quote the King James Version (Luke 2:16). And wouldn’t you? They couldn’t keep this message to themselves. They abandoned all pretenses and bolted into Bethlehem, sheep and all, to find the Messiah. Imagine the sight they must have been, knocking on doors, waking up the locals, shouting the good news that the long-awaited Messiah had finally come. They didn’t simply marvel at the message. They believed it, and it changed their direction.

A temptation for us, this Christmas, is to simply get full of “the feels,” the warm sentimentality of this season, and miss the good news at the heart of the holiday: Christ has come into the world to save you and to save me. The angel told the shepherds that this good news was “for you.” It was personal.

I like how Kent Hughes puts it in his commentary on Luke: “The truth is, even if Christ were born in Bethlehem a thousand times but not within you, you would be eternally lost. The Christ who was born into the world must be born in your heart. Religious sentiment, even at Christmastime, without the living Christ is a yellow brick road to darkness.”

The shepherds left their fields and became the most unlikely of messengers. John Calvin says of them, “Though God had, at his command, many honorable and distinguished witnesses, he passed by them, and chose shepherds, persons of humble rank, and of no account among men.”

God is on the move, building his church around the world, mostly through people you will never hear of: folks without significant Twitter followings, with no official titles, and of whom the world is mostly unworthy.

Are you among them? Go tell it on the mountain, the Christmas hymn urges us, that Jesus Christ is born!

~ Daniel Darling

Merry Christmas!