Stress Test Devotional May 4
May 04, 2024
LUKE 2:15 | When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.”
LUKE 2:20 | The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.
Not only did God choose to partner with human beings at Bethlehem, he chose strangely! He picked the night shift shepherds as witnesses of the birth, and non-Jewish visitors as wise-supporters. God has a prediction for what modern parlance terms “radical inclusivity”. He loves to act with and through the small and lowly, the outsider and the unlikely ones. God sees abilities where we see deficits. He sees actors when we see observers, solutions where we see problems.
In the first century shepherds were very low on the social scale, their work made them unclean. Are you ever too quick to dismiss others’ capacity to contribute or lead?
How good are we at including people at VPC?
