God's timeless plan

Sometimes, when preparing for a service, you stumble across that hymn you haven’t sung for some time, with a verse you usually skipped over. It was in preparing for one of the last advent services for this year that I came across this one in the hymn ‘Long ago prophets knew':

God in time, God in man,
this is God’s timeless plan:
he will come, as a man,
born himself of woman,
God divinely human: 

It was the timeless plan that struck me. I like to plan and prepare and this requires looking ahead, judging each eventuality and planning how to respond. It requires forethought rather than hindsight. For the last couple of weeks life seems to have been all about the nativity, about an event a couple of thousand years ago, an event with cosmic significance and yet when Christmas comes, some years it feels like a single event, something that we remember rather than something that we are part of. Reflection rather than participation, looking back rather than looking in.

The hymn though speaks of the timelessness of the story and God's plan.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. 

If this plan, that centres on the nativity scene and the birth of a child, is timeless, then it goes back all the way beyond when the Spirit hovered over the deep and the Word was with God, and it goes forward to a point in time that I will never know. 

And if the plan is reaching in time beyond me then it is encompassing me and including me. The birth of this oh so special child is part of God’s plan to shine light in to my darkness, it is part of His plan for my salvation and the forgiveness of my sins. How often have I been guilty of preaching context and generalisations, of focusing on why the people needed the Messiah then and why we as a world need him now, whilst at the same time forgetting the fact that I need a Messiah too and that Messiah is the same Christ child. 

When I start to participate and look in to the nativity scene rather than reflect and look back to it, then I stop seeing the plan of the 25th December 0 AD, (or the 5th June 8 BC or … or whatever - a day fixed in time), and I start to see a plan that involves me this day. It is part of God’s timeless plan that “he will come, as a man, born himself of woman” in order to walk with me in my journey, to carry me when my steps falter, to ‘deliver me from evil’, to be my salvation and the source of my eternal life. 

Yet it doesn’t just have my name written on it. The challenges in each of our lives are different, some mountains are higher and some valleys are darker, and yet the plan to navigate each crest and depth was formed beyond the reaches of time as we know it and involves a solution worked out in a cattle shed with shepherds and wise men … and probably a donkey. Advent is not just about reflection and expectation, it is about participation in a timeless plan that involved us from day one.