WHERE IS THE BEST PLACE TO GET HELP?

One of the most well-quoted Christmas verses is ‘Behold the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son and shall call His name IMMANUEL: God with us’. It celebrates God giving us His Son, born from a woman who had never had intercourse and hence fully God and fully human.

The original statement was made about 700 years earlier. The nation was under attack from hostile forces and the Lord sent Isaiah the prophet to offer His help to the king. The king refused, he preferred to seek help from the mighty Assyrian army rather than the unseen God. Nevertheless God assured the king that the invasion would be over in the time it would take a woman to conceive a child, give birth and wean him - about 2 years.

Sadly because the king preferred to ask for help from the Assyrians they insisted that he submit his nation to them and pay taxes to them. The king had made a mess and his nation suffered.

History shows how often people have found themselves in trouble and tried to sort it out themselves. Often they only make matters worse.

So what is the relevance of the verse quoted above? Much in every way.

The root problem in all of us is the same: there are wrong attitudes and desires and we find ourselves saying, thinking and doing things which we know to be wrong. There are a multitude of ideas as to how we could sort this out but only one comes from God Himself, revealed in the Bible. He chose to send His Son who would live a life without once saying, thinking or doing anything bad. He would then be nailed to a cross and take on Himself the punishment which we deserve.

He said that everyone who then asks God for forgiveness, on the basis that He has already taken our punishment, will be forgiven. However this is not an invitation to go back to what we were like before. The condition attached to God’s forgiveness is that we start to live under His authority. Since He knows what is best for us, we gain from this.

We might say: But I was christened, or I went to church, or I do a lot of good’. That’s great but it isn’t what God said. He said that we needed to receive His forgiveness because of what Jesus did, not because of what we do.