My favorite character in all of English literature is the legendary consulting detective of 221B Baker Street – Sherlock Holmes. The modern BBC adaptation is, undoubtedly, my favorite show on the “tele” (as the English say).

One of the more humorous parts of Holmes’ personality is his obsession with the extraordinary. A modern rendition of his business advertisement captures the quirk quite well:

I’m Sherlock Holmes, the world’s only consulting detective.

I’m not going to go into detail about how I do what I do because chances are you wouldn’t understand. If you’ve got a problem that you want me to solve, then contact me.  This is what I do:

1. I observe everything.

2. From what I observe, I deduce everything.

3. When I’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how mad it
might seem, must be the truth.

If you need assistance, contact me and we’ll discuss its potential. Interesting cases only please.

The ordinary bores Holmes to a debilitating degree and so he must have interesting cases. I often wonder if we Christians don’t approach the truth of Christmas with a similar distaste for what we think is boringly ordinary.

We saw yesterday how the angels’ song in Luke 2 proclaims that Jesus came to give His father glory and His people peace. No truth is more foundational to our faith, yet it can be so utterly ordinary that we find it to be uninteresting or unsurprising. The Incarnation can become so common to our minds that it gets put on the “Uninteresting Shelf” of souls. And so we clamor and shout for other doctrines, when in reality, outside of the Trinity, no truth or doctrine of Christianity is as mysterious and interesting as the Incarnation. God has come down to lift us up, He has become weak to make us strong, He has been born so He might die. This is most interesting! This is life altering!

See afresh how gloriously interesting the Incarnation is.

The extraordinary truth of Christ’s birth and its purpose – God’s glory and our peace – demands two ordinary responses from God’s people, responses exemplified by the shepherds in Luke 2.

2 ORDINARY RESPONSES TO THE EXTRAORDINARY BABY KING

First, Jesus came to give His Father glory and so we worship. Luke 2:15-16 tell us that after hearing the angels’ song the shepherds went to Bethlehem and found the baby King. 2:20 says, “And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.” As we have said, the glory of God is uniquely displayed in the birth of Jesus. The heavenly chorus begins the symphony of God’s glory in redemption that will soon crescendo at the cross. We are invited to join in and worship. Does not your heart want to burst in song with the angels? To glorify and praise God for the miracle of Christ’s birth? If not, ask why not? Have you become so disengaged from God that He no longer amazes you? Is cherished secret sin in your soul pushing out your heart’s ability to cherish this King worthy of all worship? He came to give His father glory, and so we worship.

Second, Jesus came to give His people peace and so we witness. With haste the shepherds go to find the baby and when they arrive 2:17 says, “They made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child.” They bear witness. This is the pattern of the Christian life: the vertical response of worship and the horizontal response of witness. 2 Corinthians 5 says God is bringing peace to the world through Christ and so “we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.” Ambassadors bearing witness, heralding the good news, imploring the world to be reconciled to God, this is ordinary the response to Christ’s coming and bringing His people peace. Do we have this kind of joyful earnestness to announce His terms of peace? I suspect we all feel humbled by the shepherds’ response. Let us pray for God to embolden and empower us through His Spirit to boldly and clearly proclaim the wonder of His Son.

To the distracted world in which we live, the Christmas story was just a small, insignificant acorn that was just a blip on the canvas of history. But the Incarnation, this truth that is more fantastic than fiction, this little acorn would soon grow into an oak of redemption that shines forth the majesty of God to the universe. So sing with joy, in peace, and from love this Christmas because Jesus came to give His Father glory and His people peace.