It Does Not Stop There

A baby was born in a manger and bedded down in a feeding trough.  It wasn’t a rich man’s start in life.  It wasn’t just any baby, though.  This baby was the Son of God.  I recently heard someone quoted as saying, “…when God came down the stairway of heaven with a baby in His arms’.
That’s basically what happened.  It’s the story of Christmas.  He brought down His Son and placed Him in Mary and Joseph’s arms.  However, it wasn’t just into their hands that God placed Him.   Eventually, He also fell into the hands of the leaders of the Jewish people, then into the hands of the Roman governor.  They killed Him, but he rose again.  The story doesn’t stop there because it wasn’t all by happenstance.  It was purposed by God.  That death and resurrection were accomplished for us, and not just for us, but for the sins of the whole world.  God had a plan.
However, it doesn’t stop there.  That’s because for His death and resurrection to be effective for the world they need to know it and receive Him, acknowledging His death and resurrection for their sins.  They need to hear.
It doesn’t stop there.  This is where we come in.  Someone needs to tell them.  We are those ‘someones’.  You know the story.  It’s the great commission.  I could quote you all of the verses here, but you already know them.
It doesn’t stop there.  Actually, it doesn’t stop until they’ve all heard . . . until we’ve told them all about the baby that God carried in His arms down the stairway of heaven and was put into our hands.  In essence, the baby’s still in our arms until we hand Him and His message off to the world.  He’s still in our hands until we hand Him off with the message of His saving grace to the next generation.
I’d love to be able to say that we didn’t have to hand Him off to the next generation because we were successful in handing the message of the baby off to this whole generation ourselves . . . perhaps the final generation. What if it did finally stop right here because we finally reached them all?  What if next Christmas we could celebrate together up there, looking back on all this realizing that it had finally stopped here?  What can we do today to make that happen?