Thought For The Week

(A sermon delivered December 7, 2025) “If God is real, why doesn’t He just show Himself plainly?” That question echoes across coffee shops, classrooms, and social media feeds. We live in the most visually powerful age in history—telescopes that peer billions of light-years, microscopes that map a single cell, satellites that can read the license plate on your car from orbit—and yet we have become the blindest generation when it comes to seeing God.

The reason is painfully simple: we are looking in the wrong places. The Bible keeps shouting a message that bruises our pride: God deliberately hides Himself in the lowly, the weak, the forgotten, and the despised. As one old preacher put it, “The reason modern man cannot find God is that he will not look low enough.”

Scripture proves it from the very first Christmas night. While Caesar Augustus sat on the throne of the world and parades marched through marble halls, the King of kings was born in a stable that smelled of manure and wet straw and animal manure. He was laid not in a golden cradle but in a feeding trough. The heavenly host could have split the sky over Jerusalem and announced the news to priests and princes. Instead, they sang to a handful of shepherds—men so low on the social ladder they were not even allowed to testify in Jewish courts.

For the next thirty years the Eternal Word lived in Nazareth, a town whose very name was a punchline. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nathanael scoffed (John 1:46). Jesus’ answer was to spend three decades there, hammering nails, sweeping sawdust, eating ordinary meals with ordinary sinners. And when the time came for Him to reveal His glory, He chose the lowest place of all: Golgotha, the city garbage heap outside the gate, where Rome crucified its trash. There, naked, mocked, bleeding, and gasping, the Holy One became a curse for us (Galatians 3:13).

He who was in the form of God did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, took the form of a slave, and became obedient unto death—even death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8). He stooped to wash filthy feet on the night before He died, was numbered with criminals, and finally lay lifeless in a borrowed tomb. How much lower can the Infinite go? He went that low so that we—who were dead in sin—might live.

And here is the staggering truth: He has never stopped hiding in low places. In the final judgment scene of Matthew 25, Jesus does not say, “I was eloquent and you listened to My podcast,” or “I was successful and you followed My brand.” He says, “I was hungry and you fed Me… thirsty and you gave Me drink… a stranger and you welcomed Me… naked and you clothed Me… sick and in prison and you visited Me.” When the righteous ask in astonishment, “Lord, when did we see You like that?” He answers, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of Mine, you did it to Me.”

Every cup of cold water handed to the homeless man everyone else steps over, every visit to the nursing home nobody wants to smell, every letter written to a prisoner, every embrace given to the shaking addict—those are direct encounters with the risen Christ. The world calls such people “human garbage.” Jesus calls them “My brothers and sisters.”

Modern pride looks up—to skyscrapers and rockets, to soaring stock indexes and influencers with millions of followers, to TED Talks and filtered Instagram lives, and above all to self. Our necks have grown stiff from staring at our own reflection, just like the “stiff-necked” Israel of old who refused the yoke of obedience. The gospel reverses every human value system: the way up is down, the way to greatness is service, the way to find God is to look low.

That is why the early church looked the way it did: fishermen, tax collectors, zealots, prostitutes, recovering sinners—not a gathering of the wise, noble, or respectable. Paul reminded the Corinthians, “Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many powerful, not many of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise…so that no one might boast in His presence” (1 Corinthians 1:26-29). When Alexander Campbell and others called for simple New Testament Christianity, they were pleading for exactly this: a church that looks like Jesus—a hospital for the broken, not a country club for the polished.

Even our weekly Lord’s Supper is a humble reminder. A tiny cracker and a sip of juice—hardly a banquet fit for kings—yet in that simple meal we meet the crucified and risen Lord. If we can find Him there, surely we can find Him in the teenager from the broken home, the widow on food stamps, the ex-convict, the psychiatric-ward patient whose medication makes him shake.

Because Jesus looked low enough to die for us while we were still enemies, God has exalted Him to the highest place and given Him the name above every name (Philippians 2:9). One day the Lowly One will return in glory, and everyone who learned to serve “the least of these” will be lifted up with Him.

Until that day, where will we be found looking?

Jesus looked low enough for you. Will you look low enough to come to Him—and to go to those in whom He still hides today?

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