DIVINE BIRTH

 

 

My appreciation for the Saviour’s birth deepens every year. We tend to be very focused on the importance of the Saviour’s sacrifice through the infinite Atonement and so we should be, but the  truth remains, there would never have been an Atonement, if there was never the birth.

“Life is a school, a place for us to learn and grow. We experience ‘growing pains’ through the sorrow and contamination of a lone and dreary world. These experiences may include sin, but they also include mistakes, disappointments, and the undeserved pain of adversity. The blessed news of the Gospel is that the Atonement of Jesus Christ can purify all the uncleanness and sweeten all the bitterness we taste.

“Bitter fruits of life can destroy our peace, break our hearts, and separate us from God. Could it be that the great Atonement of Christ could put back together the broken parts and give beauty to the ashes of experience? The Atonement can heal the effects of tasting all of mortal bitterness.” (Bruce C. Hafen, Beauty for Ashes, Ensign April 1990).

Christ’s birth leads to the Cross of Calvary. It opens the door to the Saviour’s healing power through which He can turn life’s bitter fruits into sweet, bind up the broken hearted, turn the corruptible into incorruptible, the threads of frailty into eternal cords of strength, the broken into whole, to liberate the captive and let out of the prison of mortal weakness them that are bound… He can give us eternal beauty for the ashes of mortality (Isaiah 61:1)

Without birth there would not be death and without death there would not be life. To this end was He born (John 18:37).

“We fancy that God can only manage His world by big battalions….when all the while He is doing it by beautiful babies…When a wrong wants righting, or a work wants doing, or a truth wants preaching, or a continent wants opening, God sends a baby into the world to do it. That is why, long, long ago, a babe was born at Bethlehem.”

-        (F.W. Boreham, Mountains in the Mist: Some Australian Reveries [1919], 166-67,170)

 

The baby in the stable

So innocent and sweet,

On the altar of sacrifice

Lay at Father’s feet.

 

- CATHRYNE ALLEN  

(Art: Unto Us A Child is Given by Eva Koleva Timothy)