“He came to his own, yet his own received him not” (John 1:11).
The Jews of the first century were a hardened people. Weary from the struggle against sin and heresy, and especially of being dominated by foreign peoples who cared nothing for their God—they had steeled themselves against anything that might break into their world and threaten their way of life. Only trouble was they were too successful. They had so insulated themselves against the outside world that they could no longer hear the voice of God.
Christians experienced something similar at the end of the first generation of the church. John wrote to one of them, “I know your works, your patient endurance, and how you have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not. But I have this against you: you have abandoned the love you had at first” (Rev. 2:3-4).
These are embattled times in America, and if the danger was there for the early church, then it’s there for us too. But let us not forget that when the Lord returned to his people, he came not in glory and power, but in lowliness and gentleness—in the form of a small child. And in his adulthood he taught that the Kingdom of God belonged to such as these.
Pastor Chad and Becky Lewis