Jesus Changes Everything: A 5-Day Devotional With Randy AlcornSample

Having been raised with no knowledge of God, as a teenager part of what drew me to Christ is how the Gospel accounts seemed so contrary to typical human reasoning. Yet I found them completely credible. No human would make up such a story! It had the ring of truth to me…and still does.

In the Old Testament, we read how God kept reaching down to His people: “The Lord…sent word to them through his messengers again and again, because he had pity on his people…But they mocked God’s messengers, despised his words and scoffed at his prophets” (2 Chronicles 36:15-16).

The prophets foretold the coming of Messiah. Yet centuries of oppression and suffering passed, and many lost hope. In every generation there were people like Simeon and Anna who longed for and prayed for Messiah’s coming. And finally, when the Redeemer’s absence became unbearable, He came: “But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4). 

Jesus came to us in humility. He didn’t have the honor of being born to the house of a king. He wasn’t born in Rome, the world’s political capital, or Athens, the philosophical capital, or Alexandria, the intellectual capital, or even Jerusalem, the religious capital. He was born in tiny Bethlehem, which means simply “House of Bread.”

Jesus came in humiliation. Everyone who could count thought He was conceived out of wedlock, a shameful thing in that time and place. He grew up in a town of ill repute, where a Roman military outpost accounted for moral corruption: “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” (John 1:46). 

Jesus worked as a humble carpenter, lived in relative poverty, and endured many indignities as He spent three years teaching and healing and speaking the good news of God’s Kingdom. And then, the eternal and infinitely holy Son of God chose to endure the most shameful death—crucifixion with its excruciating suffering—to take our sins on Himself. Not some, but all of them.