“THE ECHOES OF AN HEAVENLY CALL”
MERRY THURSDAY by Parris Bailey
“The shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.” Luke 2:15
Augustine talked about two cities in his book, “The City of God”. The City of Man is shaped by the love of self, even to the contempt of God and the City of God is shaped by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. Each of us will make a decision one way or the other which city will be ours. I find that we look for God in all the wrong places.
The Interpreter’s Bible says; “Some people never find God or know that they might find him because they suppose that God must be identified with some far-off and surprising thing. They do not walk the road that would lead to him through the simple process of taking the next step in spiritual obedience. It is not in imaginary flights that men will most surely find God. They will find him in the growing confidence that life is good which comes to those who are going steadily ahead in the direction of the next God step they know. God will not be found in some strange and distant day, but he will be found now in the things which are most dear -in the familiar blessings of friendship and affection, in the daily beauty of patience and devotion and faith and love.”
In Luke the first chapter tells the amazing story of some common people getting a divine visitation. They were ordinary everyday folk like you and me. But it’s how they respond that counts.
Let’s Read from the Expositor’s Bible: “The shepherds wanted to trace the vibrations of the angels song. They didn’t want to distance themselves but yield themselves up to it entirely. Like their father Jacob they too were citizens of two worlds. They could lead their flocks into green pastures and mend the fold or they could wrestle with angels and prevail. In our earthly modes of thinking we push the sacred and the secular far apart as if they were two different worlds or at any rate as opposite hemispheres of the same world, with but few points of contact between them. It is not so. The secular is the sacred on its under, its earthward side. It is a part of that great whole we call duty, and in our earthly callings, if they are but pure and honest, we may hear the echoes of a heavenly call. So as we sanctify life’s common things, they cease to be common, and the earthly becomes less earthly as we learn to see more of heaven in it. In the weaving of our life some of its threads stretch earthward, and some heavenward, but they stretch and interlace, and together they form the warp and the woof of one fabric, which should be like the garment of the Master which is without seam, woven from the top throughout. Happy is that life which keeping an open eye over the flock, keeps too a heart open towards heaven, ready to listen to the angelic music, and ready to transfer its rhythm to their own hastening feet or their praising lips.”
We need to remember those rare occasions when we are divinely inspired and let the music of this great fact keep echoing in our recollection. The shepherds saw that God focuses on the simple and the human and they simply responded.