Hello, I’m David Jeremiah and welcome to the Why the Nativity Experience as we live out the wonder of his love. It was Christmas 1943 and America’s most popular kuner Bing Crosby recorded one of the most beloved Christmas songs ever written. I’ll be home for Christmas. Since then, this song has become a favorite carol turning hearts and minds toward being home for Christmas with the family they hold dear.
But did you know there was a famous Christmas at which no one was at home? Everyone who participated in the very first Christmas was away from home so that you and I could find our way to our eternal home in heaven and so that we can celebrate the Christ of Christmas forever. When that first group of people gathered in Bethlehem, all of them had left home.
They didn’t realize their gathering would be immortalized and celebrated every year for the next 2,000 years, but it has been. Remembering their absence from their homes reminds us that we also are away from our true eternal home this Christmas. With each Christmas celebration, the Lord’s return draws nearer, as does our arrival at our own heavenly home.
who was away from home. First, there were Mary and Joseph. When Caesar Augustus declared that a census should be taken, the expectant parents were forced to leave their home in Nazareth and make the slow, arduous journey to Bethlehem, the home of Joseph’s ancestors. [music] The 50-mi journey probably took them most of a week.
With frequent stops for Mary to rest, the young couple was perhaps one of the last to arrive in the city of David. The stable where they took shelter was not their home, but it was where the prophet Micah had predicted they’d be on that world changing night of the first Christmas. And then there were the angels.
They left their heavenly home to come to the sky above Bethlehem to announce the birth of Jesus [music] to the shepherds. how different earth must have seemed to them and how they must have wondered about the way the king of heaven and earth was being introduced to his future earthly subjects. He was born in a stable cushioned [music] on straw swaddled in rough linen and attended by humble shepherds.
