You Shall Name Him Jesus - Lee Brainard
All across the world this month, the account of the birth of Jesus in the first chapter of Matthew will be read. My favorite verse in the passage is, “She will bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins.” Jesus is a transliteration of the Hebrew word Yeshua which means salvation.
The meaning of these words is staggering. At Christmas time we celebrate the birth of the Messiah. But his birth was unlike our own. We are born to live. He was born to die. He was born to be the Saviour of the world — the Lamb of God which takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). It is easy in America, under the distractions of affluence and the commercialized version of Christmas, to loose sight of this, the real meaning of the season — God was manifest in the flesh to die an ignominious death on the cross on Calvary for the whole human race, to save them from their sins.
So what can people do if they realize that they don’t really understand what Christmas is about? They can take up the Bible and read all four Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In them they will discover what Christmas really means. They will discover who Jesus is, why he came into the world in human flesh, what he did while on earth, and what he is going to do when he comes again.
~Lee Brainard, December 20, 2014