Isaiah 9: 4
For you will break the yoke of their slavery and lift the heavy burden from their shoulders. You will break the oppressor’s rod, just as you did when you destroyed the army of Midian.
There was a popular song by this title. I admit, it always rankled a bit because it is a song right from the heart of pain and brokenness and that is where we all were before love entered and repaired the injury of our past.
Yesterday we favored a popular verse from this chapter. Verse 6 is the good news – a child is born; a son is given. Yahoo! But, what does love have to do with it? Look at the verse which precedes the giving of the divine child for the answer. The premier Father of all saw the slavery, the heavy burden upon the shoulders of us all. He saw the oppressor’s rod beating us down. The weight of our lives was too much for our shoulders; the oppressor too strong. The burden of simply surviving weighed upon humanity, and indeed, each of us so oppressively that drawing air was all we could manage. Under the might of the oppressor’s rod we had no strength to mount a defense much less an offensive attack. Therefore, Love, sent a child.
Does that even make sense? Love sent a child to break the yoke of slavery and oppression from our backs. Thank you, beloved, for this first of all Christmas gifts. And, it is this gift which we celebrate at Christmas. As we thank God, our Father, for removing the yoke of bondage from our shoulders, we may also pause and remember that there are still many people who do not know the freeing gift of Christ. They still live in the pain and the turmoil of a bitter, hard life.
Jesus came to grant liberty to the captives, freedom to all who are enslaved by any type of burden. Truly, those who are without Christ suffer and are as bound as the Israelites in Egypt. Perhaps, they suffer even more because their spirit and soul suffer torment while they have the illusion of being free because they are not physically chained. Anyone who can call love a secondhand emotion has never experienced it.
What does love have to do with it? What does love have to do with anything? Absolutely everything. Love is the answer to the question and to every question. If we stop and ask what love has to do with each situation of life, the true answer will present itself because God will show us the way. Love sent a baby to earth to free you, and me, from pain and from all those things which attempted to enslave us.
Love sent the first Christmas present, a child. Now, I send you love as this year’s present. Merry Christmas!