Come Just As You Are

Could love have ever been more perfectly captured? In the cries of newborn lungs tasting our air for the first time was the voice of the One for whom the world had waited. There in the arms of a teenage girl, on the floor of a stable, wrapped in rags—His Majesty.

I wonder how the shepherds that night must have appeared. I am not sure what they heard in the angels’ song over their fields, but I cannot help but think that they were led to believe that in Bethlehem they would find the hope they had longed for all of their lives. Hope. The hope of a better day. The hope of true love. The hope of life.

Sprinting across fields and running through the city streets, they searched for the One about whom they had been told. And I imagine that moment when, stumbling over each other, they found Him—when they saw His face. The eyes of man witnessing the dawn of grace.

Without a thought for appearances they had run. They were the uneducated weather-worn blue-collar souls of their day. Nameless even in the Bible, they were known collectively for what they did rather than who they were:  a nameless bunch of ordinary—perhaps less than ordinary—everyday men, running at a dead sprint in the hope that it was true that a king really had been born for them. And winded and out of breath, they found Him. What a perfect picture of the age old invitation that is so often forgotten, “Come, just as you are.”

And the message, as clear today as it was on that night. Come without regard for where you have been or what you have done. For those whose names no one knows, and for those whose sin everyone knows, come. Run to find the humble Savior. Come, stumbling over yourselves, to see His face. Sit in the silence of the manger and take it all in. And let this echo across your heart: salvation is here.

PRAYER:  Father, Your message was so clear that night two thousand years ago. Help it to remain clear to me today. May I remember to come, just as I am, and receive all that You are.

“And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us,” Luke 2:15 KJV.

Today’s devotion is by Matthew McCord. An attorney in McDonough, GA, Matt describes himself simply as a son, a brother, a friend, a musician, a teacher and a lawyer. He is equally comfortable in the boardroom, the courtroom, the classroom, by a trout stream, and in church.