NO ROOM FOR JESUS

By John Stallings

…..There was no room for them in the Inn.—Luke 2:7

If God became a man, what would we expect Him to be like?

First, we’d expect Him to be sinless. Jesus was. “He was tempted in all points like as we are yet without sin.” Even Pilate who sat as his judge after all the noise that had gone away, came to this conclusion… “I find no fault with this man.”

The Roman soldier came to the same conclusion & so did the thief on the cross. Nobody could ever bring an accusation against Him. A trail before Annas, a trial before Caiaphas, a trial before Herod passed back to Pilate; nobody could come up with anything. If God were a man I’d expect Him to be sinless. The record of history & the apostolic testimony & the truth is; Jesus was sinless.

If God were a man I’d expect Him to speak the most profound & greatest words ever spoken. Wouldn’t you? Jesus did. The comment of his critics was, “We never heard anybody speak like this.” Every time He spoke they were absolutely astounded.

If God were a man I would also expect Him to exert a profound influence over everyone He came in contact with. He did.

The impact of Jesus Christ on humanity is without equal. His disciples were simple men but He turned them into men who changed the world. And He’s still transforming people like that. Influence…. if He were God, I’d expect Him to have influence like that.

If God were a man I’d expect Him to do miracles. Jesus did…repeatedly, publicly, unarguably, dramatically & prolifically.

If God were a man I’d expect Him to know the future. Jesus did. He predicted things about Himself, things about the nation Israel, details about the future, and the end of the world.


If God were a man, I’d expect Him to show us what God was like. He did. We saw in Him love, kindness, mercy & grace that was absolutely utterly & beyond anything any human could ever experience. And we saw in Him a level of virtue, fairness, wisdom, the likes of which the world has never seen.

If God were a man & He came to earth, He’d come out Jesus Christ. And that’s the case. He makes the invisible God visible.

In Jesus Christ, we’re not dealing with a man, not just a great man; we’re dealing with the creator of the whole universe. The whole Kosmos, the whole material universe was made by Jesus Christ. I mean, just to think about that boggles the mind.

If you could bore a hole in the sun & start dumping earths into it, you could put one million, two-hundred thousand earths in it & still have room for four million three-hundred thousand moons.

The sun is startlingly massive. The sun is 93 million miles away. The nearest star, Alpha Centuri, is five times bigger than the sun. The moon is only 211 thousand 463 miles away. You could walk to the moon in 27 years if you’d walk 24 miles a day. A ray of light travels 186 thousand miles per second so it reaches the moon in 1.5 seconds.

If we can go that fast, if we can get up to that speed, we can reach Mercury in four & a half minutes, it’s only 50 million miles away. In fact in two minutes we can be at Venus that’s just 26 million miles. In four minutes 21 seconds we can hit Mars; it’s only 34 million miles away. We could hop over to Jupiter, that’s only 367 million miles & it will take us 35 minutes & 11 seconds.

To go to Saturn will take us an hour & 11 seconds because its 790 million miles away. If you really feel like hitting the road we could go to Uranus which is one billion six-hundred & eight million miles & Neptune which is three billion & Pluto is past all of that. And when you get to Pluto, you haven’t left the front porch.

Bettlejuice, [Betelgeuse] the amazing star, is 880 quad-drillion miles away. Now push in your upper plate…… because its diameter is…. is greater….greater than the earth’s orbit.

Who made all this matter? Who made all that stuff? JESUS. He made the creation & He made it good!

While we’re at it, if the earth’s rotation slowed down, we would alternately freeze & burn. God has got to keep His universe moving at the same speed all the time. If we get too close to the sun, percolating at 12 thousand degrees Fahrenheit, we’re going to fry. If we get any further we’re going to freeze.

Our globe has seven different movements. It circles the sun while rotating on its own axis & it wobbles, just to name three. We are tilted at 23 degrees which enables us to have four seasons. If that wasn’t the case, vapors from the ocean would move north & south & pile up massive continents of ice on both ends & we’d have major problems in the rotation to say nothing of the seasons. If the moon didn’t remain at the exact precise distance it is from the earth, the ocean tide would inundate all the land twice a day.

Who keeps all that in place? Jesus does. Listen to Colossians 1:17;--speaking of the Kosmos--

He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it together right up to this minute.—The Message

If the ocean even slipped to a few feet deeper than it is, carbon dioxide and the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere would be completely absorbed & no vegetable life could exist. Jesus is the creator, the sustainer & upholder of all creation.

The Christmas season has always been my favorite time of the year. I have always absolutely loved everything about Christmas, the colors, the Christmas music, the fellowship & the reveling in the wonderful Christmas story.

However in the last few years, like many of us I’ve been grieved when I’ve witnessed the blatant bias that is palpable in the culture during this season. We give Martin Luther King a day of celebration & the dead presidents get a day, & the 4th of July gets a day & this is as it should be. But have you ever heard of anyone suing someone for celebrating any of those days?

Isn’t it amazing that in any public setting on public property we can’t celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, sing His praises or articulate His uniqueness without the threat of a lawsuit or a ban?

But the truth is, nobody wants to stop the celebration, that’s not the idea of the commercial world, they want & need the money. I was talking to a few merchant friends of mine recently & they were moaning the blues about lack of money & hoping & praying Christmas, or Jesus, would pull then out of their financial hole. Jesus’ birthday has become all important to the business world-- if they could just have the party without Jesus everybody would be happy. The birthday of Jesus is extremely valuable if they could just keep Jesus out of it.

Why does it seem that Jesus is less important than George Washington? Why is He pushed into the background? Should people who want to sing His praises & proclaim His greatness be silenced?

The Christmas story tells us that Jesus was born in a stable because……There was no room for Him in the Inn.
2,000 years hasn’t changed the fact that there is still –NO ROOM FOR JESUS.

Listen Christian friend, if the world has no room for Jesus they won’t have room for you either. But if the world has no room for Him, you should have no room for them. I mean that in the sense that we should have no room for the wicked world system that ironically gladly accepts the financial gain Jesus brings them while refusing to acknowledge who He is.

Listen to the words of Isaiah;

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon His shoulder: and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The prince of peace. And of the increase of His government & peace, there shall be no end…..Ish.9:6-7

When Thomas Jefferson was Vice President, he tried to register at Baltimore's most posh hotel but was turned down because he was dressed as a farmer.When the hotel owner learned they'd turned away the Vice President he sent his apologies telling him he would be welcome anytime. Jefferson had already found other lodging & sent back a letter saying he fully understood the hotel owners position but that if an American farmer wasn't welcome at his hotel, then neither was the Vice President.

Much the same thing happened to the The King of the universe when He appeared in Bethlehem on that night so long ago.

Juda & I always have a lovely tree in our home at Christmas time as I’m sure you do, but the tree says something different to us than it does most of the world.

Listen to Peter tell us about what the real Christmas tree was, & is;

Who His own self bare our sins in His body on the tree, that we being dead in sins, should live unto righteousness; by whose stripes ye were healed.—1 Peter 2:24.

My wife Juda & I look forward to leaving in a few days to be with family in Pennsylvania & Tennessee over the week of Christmas. Please remember us in your prayers & as the song goes—

“Have yourself a merry little Christmas.”

Every Blessing in Christ &,

Merry Christmas everyone!!

John