I have had the privilege of knowing the divine favor of my God throughout life.

He favored me with a personal visit in the privacy of my bedroom when I was a deeply-tried 14-year-old, nearly ready to be deposited in a psychiatric institution. 

He favored me with His hand of discipline, ever the conduit of His holy love, when, as a young man, I needed to be firmly & forthrightly set straight upon the path He had set for me, as dawdling proved to be no option for one called of  God to administer His Gospel.

He favored me with a fresh infusion of His Holy Spirit upon my life in the aftermath of a rebellion in the ranks, one which left me feeling myself to be an abject failure to my parents, my fellowship, my calling and my Savior & Lord. 

He endowed me and my church leaders with wisdom, fortitude and courage from on high when our church building burned to the ground on Tuesday, May 10, 2005.  It was a momentous moment, one that would either make or break us, and one that our gracious Lord was determined to use to shape us further into His image.

And, amidst grave trial, He graciously saw me through the second most seminal epoch of my existence, as I was given an appointment with Dr. Hartzell V. Schaff of The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN in order for the dear doctor to perform what is called a septal myectomy on “me ‘art.”  Our church was struggling, I had no money, but I had the full backing of divine authority and power, as I came to experience in full.

My return from successful surgery proved to be even more formidable than the surgery itself.  Twice in the immediate aftermath of my return from successful yet risky surgery, my heart went into a “reaction” to the stress placed upon my cardiac muscle as the direct confluence of surgery itself and the arduous travel back home.

Friday evening, June 14, as we were driving home from the airport, I began to feel quite ill; upon being home, my heart felt besieged by physical forces that I had heretofore never experienced.  It was nightmarish, the product of a waking nightmare that lasted for four hours.  I refused to go to hospital, as I didn’t believe i would actually make it there, at least not alive, as the rigors of the trip would have been deadly.  My wife prayed for four hours, as did I, and the siege finally relented and I was able to fall asleep.

I awoke at 4:20 on Sunday morning the 16^th of June to another round of “reaction,” this one considerably worse in scope and duration.  The attack upon my heart was positively insidious, enveloping me from every side, as well as inside-and-out.  I will never be able to adequately describe the sheer, all-encompassing malevolence of it, but what I can say is that I knew at 6am, deep within me and beyond a shadow of a doubt, that, if God did not deliver me from such an experience, I would not be alive by 7am.  I cried out to God that very articulation, fearfully and forcefully uttered and, just like His response to the Psalmist when David similarly cried out to Him, God delivered me – Yes; just like that!

One may make of what I am about to relate as one will, but I share with you what I experienced that never-to-be-forgotten morning.  A vision was cast in front of me.  I saw fighter-jets converging from two sides of my room, then making a direct B-line for me but, as they were about to hit me, they veered off in two differing directions.  A hallucination; you may suggest?  Possibly, but what I tell you I will happily apply to an affidavit on fear of perjury:  The critical moment of my cardiac plight broke at the very moment the jets were deflected away from me!   I had several more hours of what I can only construe as hellish residuals, but I knew from that moment that I was out-of-danger.  God heard my cry, and He delivered me, not only from all of my fears (one; especially), but from the jaws of death because I would never have been able to endure another hour of such physical perfidy.

Yes; I have known the favor of my God.  He has been gracious and good to me, faithful to a fault, formidable in His discipline and steadfast in His promise.  All Christians should have a similar testimony as to the gracious favor of Almighty God upon their lives.  I take nothing away from the exquisite beauty of Mary the mother of Jesus and her

heart as it has been immortalized by her song of praise, known as the Magnificat:

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for He has looked on the humble estate of His servant.  For behold; from now on all generations will call me blessed, for He who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His name” (Luke 1:46-49).

Mary had just been on the receiving end of an extraordinary visit, as few are accorded the experience of an encounter with one who declares of himself, as he did to Zecharias the priest, “I am Gabriel who stand in the presence of God” (Luke 1.19).  The angel shared with Mary that she would find herself with child, a child who would be named Jesus, as He would “save His people from their sins” and be found to be the Son of God.  No other woman in the world may ever proffer such a claim, but Mary could, and in utter humility yet with complete confidence that God would be true to His Word; after all, she was well-aware that His favor was upon her.

She would honor and glorify God and He would orchestrate affairs such that Mary would be honored throughout time, down through history and by God’s people as the woman to whom the good Lord entrusted the nurture of Jesus.  And Mary would be acutely and appreciatively aware of the character of God, a character “characterized” (no linguistic pun intended!) by His power, a power benevolently applied to the mother of Jesus, and His holiness, a blessed adjectival accompaniment to His Name.

Mary’s poetic and musical winsomeness of spirit would also give laud to God for His care and concern for others, a care and concern that would have a direct converse concerning those who had no viability before God because of their self-satisfaction and sin:

“And His mercy is for those who fear Him from generation to generation.  He has shown strength with His arm; He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; He has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty.  He has helped His servant Israel, in remembrance of His mercy, as He spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to His offspring forever (Luke 1:50-55).

God casts His favor, not upon the proud or the mighty or the rich, though they; too, might know His beneficent favor, if only they reflect the values that God so greatly esteems, such as the proverbial yet real “fear of the Lord,” as well as humility and the kind of hunger that strikes deep root in one’s soul, a hunger not so much for food as for righteousness, as Jesus would so capture in the Beatitudes:  “’Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (Matthew 5.6).

Almighty God, even in His wrath, never forgets to be merciful.  His justice is always tempered with mercy, which is why mercy is a quality within us that is highly esteemed by Him, as “the infinite superabundance of the divine mercy,” as the esteemed Jewish convert to Catholic Christianity Simone Weil has so impressively put it, is present to us who abide in the terrestrial and traumatized realm.  He will be in quest of faith upon His Return to earth, aka the Resurrection, but He will by no means scoff at mercy, as divine a characteristic as one may find in fallen but earnest man, an expression of divinity that is nurtured by spiritual hunger, a hunger alien to, but respected by, God Himself.

Lack of hunger gives cause for concern, as lack of awareness of one’s hunger gives pause even to our sense of humanity.  Simone Weil makes the further astute comment in a remarkable essay entitled, “Forms of The Implicit Love of God”:

 “The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry.  The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying.  A child does not stop crying if we suggest to it that perhaps there is no bread.  It goes on crying just the same.  The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty.”

It is the plight and bane of the modern world and of contemporary man.  God has been winnowed from our souls and excised from the public domain, with mere pickings of Him left to be plucked by a few frail and pathological types who would otherwise require drugs, a cynical conclusion to those who, like Karl Marx, arrogantly suggested that Religion is the opiate of the masses, as if communism and materialism and secularism aren’t opiates to the unbelieving world of modernity!

Yet religion is alive and well; still, “the full-fledged religious world,” as the great devotional writer Oswald Chambers has quipped, can just as easily defy the quest for true righteousness, as it all-too-often lacks humility, and all-too-often exhibits a righteousness of self that snuffs out mercy. 

God simply will not cast His favor upon such as these – He just won’t.

It is why we can only enter the Kingdom of God as a child, just as Jesus could only meaningfully enter this world as a child.   Christmas is a time of good cheer for many, if only because the story of Christmas brings a veritable feast that gives sustenance to those who want restored rapport with God their Father.   He casts His favor upon those who come to Him in the same spirit as did the wise men on the one hand and the shepherds on the other – To Him they came, having come from the halls of intellectual inquiry and the “real” world of sweat and muscle and assertion.  They wanted more than that, as they wanted what Jesus had to offer – In truth and in short:  They wanted Jesus, as only He could ultimately satisfy them, for “in Him is hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2.3), as He is “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14.6).

Those upon whom God casts His favor are the very same who feed upon Him at both trough and table.  It is a satiation of a particular kind of hunger, a hunger that is satisfied by a merciful God and humble Savior, One who utilized the motif of a meal to illustrate all He had to offer by way of the giving of His life for His friends, let alone the world.

Apologist Ravi Zacharias speaks intellectually but spiritually when he writes of The Lord’s Table:

“There has not been a simpler act in history with more profound transactional memory attached … In that simple transaction, all of history finds its meaning in the Person of Christ.  Jesus’ death in the past is remembered in the present and points to the future when we will break bread with Him in eternity” (from Jesus Among the Gods).

How little did the disciples realize that their Lord was casting His favor upon them in ways far more profound than simply an invitation to an evening supper!  An invitation to a standard issue banquet is gratifying, but to be invited to share in the delectables and delicacies of the heavenly table is a kind of favorable accord that defies human reasoning or imagination, but not experience, courtesy of our gracious and beneficent God.

I have learned that I shall never hunger nor thirst, provided that I sup upon the life and love of my beloved Lord.  That I may speaks to His favor upon me; that such nourishment gives me such energy as is required to serve Him gives me allowance to serve as a conduit of His favor upon others who live all around me, the very same who are spiritually malnourished, regardless of whether they know.

The message of Christmas calls to their attention that God knows their need, has reached down from heaven to meet their need for a Savior, to whom they may look for everything they need, from nourishment to nurture to purpose and fulfillment.  What manner of favor is this, that Christ would give His divine life to cast such divine favor upon so many dead souls?  It is the favor requisite to His holy love – Hallelujah, Praise God & may a Blessed & Merry Christmas be yours’ in the knowledge that He has cast His favor upon you!

Bradley E. Lacey

Christmas 2020