“Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place under these circumstances: When His mother Mary had been promised in marriage to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be pregnant [through the power of the Holy Spirit].” Matt 1:18 (Amplified)
There is something unnerving, yet refreshing about God – He loves upsetting the applecart of our conventional wisdom. He delights in tearing up our man-made rules to enable His will be done in our lives. He has steadfastly refused to be pigeon-holed by a convention-mad world and so routinely confuses and nullifies the wisdom of the wise by using the simple to achieve His lofty objectives. So, you can say that He was acting true to His character when He chose a poor and modest, but already betrothed girl to be the vessel through which the Messiah would be born. He supernaturally made her pregnant in a conservative society that heavily censure aberrant or out-of- wedlock relationships and then convinced Joseph to adopt the resultant child. Had Hollywood written the script for this story, they would not have done any better.
This was not the first time that God defied convention. He fully integrated Rahab, a condemned Canaanite prostitute, into Israel and honoured her by making her one of the progenitors of the Messiah. Ruth the Moabitess was another example of someone who was adopted into the family of God in spite of the law banning Moabites from integrating into Israel for ten generations. He made Gideon and David rulers of His people, even though these were hardly considered human in their respective families – they were the insignificant despised lastborn of their fathers. He made the unpolished and uneducated His eloquent spokespersons, translating a weakness into admirable strength and used them to accomplish His will in the power of the Holy Spirit.
The harsh reality is that life often imposes its limitations on us and these can define as well as restrict the expression and achievement of our God-given potentials. The good news is that God specialises in removing limitations, whether self, people or demon imposed. The world has a way of putting people where it thought they ought to be and not necessarily where God intended them to be. So, if you are presently limited by your gender, education, colour, caste, age, physical condition etc, understand that God delights in turning perceived liabilities into assets by His Spirit. His plans for you are of good and not of evil to give you an expected end. You therefore need to surrender those limitations to Him and allow Him to help you lift them off you. You then need to develop a winning mindset, which allows you to see yourself the way God already sees you. The only way to do this is by believing and receiving into your being the positive and uplifting affirmations that God’s word says about you as well as rejecting those negative and soul-destroying things that the world consistently say about and to you. Whatever kind of world in which you have found yourself, understand that you were made to defy limiting conventions. God has made you to break the mould. In fact, He has cast you in His image and thrown away the mould. Consequently, you don’t have to live subject to other people’s limited and limiting expectations. God’s expectations are enough. Finally, as you celebrate Christmas, remember that the world could never put God in a bottle. Don’t let it succeed with you. Merry CHRISTMAS!
Prayer:
Lord, I thank you that I am fearfully and wonderfully made in your image. I receive your strength to be who you say that I am by the power of your Spirit in Jesus name.