LYRICS FULL OF CHRISTMAS' REASON

"Welcome To Our World"

By Chris Rice

Tears are falling, hearts are breaking
How we need to hear from God
You've been promised, we've been waiting

Welcome Holy Child
Welcome Holy Child

Hope that you don't mind our manger
How I wish we would have known
But long-awaited Holy Stranger
Make Yourself at home
Please make Yourself at home
Bring Your peace into our violence
Bid our hungry souls be filled
Word now breaking Heaven's silence

Welcome to our world
Welcome to our world

Fragile finger sent to heal us
Tender brow prepared for thorn
Tiny heart whose blood will save us
Unto us is born
Unto us is born
So wrap our injured flesh around You
Breathe our air and walk our sod
Rob our sin and make us holy

Perfect Son of God
Perfect Son of God
Welcome to our world

Welcome To Our World is among my favorite Christmas' Reason songs.  I have it downloaded on my iPod.  When it begins my attention is arrested.  Such a simple song with simple lyrics, but they catch my breath, and steal tears from my eyes.  I think, "What a foolish God to send his beloved Son; all his wealth into the world which hates him!"  A baby!  God sends a fragile, helpless, human baby.  We could understand if God sent a mighty Son, clothed in celestial armor, flanked by legions upon legions of heaven's warrior angels.  But a baby?!?!

Chris Rice says of his song:

"It deals with the reality that God invaded our planet and became one of us, which is just astounding to me. I wrote about God coming to our world in a naïve way, knowing that it's not ours anyway, it's His. The thoughts that went through my head were about how tiny He was and how He came into the world just like the rest of us do. How much did He know at that point? When He was human flesh, was He aware at all that He was really God, or did He just accept all the limitations and start from scratch? I thought of that progression, and about the fact that He took on what He did so that we would be able to find God and be found by God."

 

God doesn't see the way we see, for God to send his salvation through a mere baby is what makes sense.  God doesn't send a super human.  God sends Jesus as clothed like mere humans.  All of us are merely human.  We have literature, comic books, movies, music, games, all kinds of things devoted to super heroes.  But for all our delusions of grandeur we are, all of us, merely human.  God, as odd as it must seem, foolish even, desires to work with what he is given.  So Father sends all his wealth; his very heart into the skin of a mere human being.  And God doesn't just send Jesus as any human.  Jesus as a human is the weakest and the worst. 

 

Who has believed our message
    and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
    and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

Isaiah 53:1-3

This, God tells us, centuries before, he sends us Jesus.  This savior is, well...how shall we say it?  Underwhelming.  Not only is Jesus a mere human, he's a human none of us would pick first for the football team, the debate team, the lead of the school play, the Homecoming king, or senior class president.  Today we'd say of Jesus, "Looks like God scraped the bottom of the barrel."  God sends us what is weak, foolish, ugly, and worthless.  God doesn't send us what we think we need, he sends us his Son in the image and likeness of what we truly are.  God doesn't accommodate what we most want to be, he meets us exactly where we are.  God is absolutely truthful about humanity with how he presents his Son of Man.  Jesus is the savior of the world, but as a man he is the least of men.
 
Why does the Almighty present us the least of men?  We think of Jesus sacrifice upon a Roman cross for the sins of the world, but Jesus' whole life is a sacrifice.  The prefect is in a human wrapper even the broken, sinful, dying race of man look down upon him.  The perfect is forced to endure all that even the worst despise.  The cross for Jesus is not something which merely ends his life, it is the whole of his life experience.  There is a method to God's seeming madness.  God's plan is to take the weakness of all humanity coupled with the almighty power of his Holy Spirit.  This is why Jesus comes as he does, so that the very least of us humans can, when made new born by, filled with, indwelt and empowered by the Holy Spirit live and serve God in the image and likeness of Jesus.  In Christ we are not mere humans with a new coat of paint, or cleaned up with spiritual Clorox bleach.  In Christ we are made completely new in spirit; born literally of God's own Spirit.  In us God places a great treasure in jars of clay, which is not of human kind.

the oath he swore to our father Abraham:

to rescue us from the hand of our enemies,
    and to enable us to serve him without fear
 in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.

Luke 1:73-75

Its the last last part of Rice's song which always leads me to tears...

Fragile finger sent to heal us
Tender brow prepared for thorn
Tiny heart whose blood will save us
Unto us is born
Unto us is born
So wrap our injured flesh around You
Breathe our air and walk our sod
Rob our sin and make us holy

Perfect Son of God
Perfect Son of God
Welcome to our world

Yes LORD, welcome into our broken flesh, welcome to being the least, welcome to ugly, welcome to disdain, welcome to a scourge, and welcome to nails on an old rugged cross.  Perfect Son of God, welcome to our world...

...And Thank you for overcoming our world! 

Jesus, You are Christmas' Reason!