God Wore My Shoes - The True Meaning Of Christmas

“To understand others you should get behind their eyes and walk down their spines,” so declared Rod McKuen.

According to Business Week, Patricia Moore who was a clothes designer, attempted to do that as much as was humanly possibly. She had watched her grandfather grapple with the various challenges that he had being stricken with arthritis, and decided to try to “get behind his eyes and walk down his spine.”

At the age of 25, she reconstructed herself into an elderly woman with bound joints and padded her back into a hump and wore contact lenses smeared with Vaseline. To complete her make-over, she wore support panty hose and a fuzzy wool coat. In other words, she tried to wear his shoes and see the world through his eyes.

Her discoveries were startling. She was ignored in stores, struggled to complete the most common tasks, crossed streets so slowly that the lights changed before she was safely on the other side and found that most people were unconcerned about her circumstances. Needless to say, she had a completely different perspective when she saw the world through his eyes.

Do you remember this scene from To Kill a Mockingbird? One of the actors said, “First of all if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

That’s what Jesus did, and this is the true, unadulterated meaning of Christmas. God came down here to wear my shoes and yours also. He climbed into our skin and saw the world through the eyes of a mortal individual, and He quickly discovered that the world looks very different from a smelly cattle shed than seeing it from the Ivory Palaces of heaven.

I am deeply moved by the words of Philippians 2:6-7 that describes the condescension of Jesus Christ. It says, “Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men…”

Speech can go no higher. “The Word became flesh…” (John 1:14) The Eternal God put on a vesture of human flesh. The Ancient of Days became a Babe in a manger. The Lord became a mere lad. The Maker became a man. The Mediator was speechless. The Mighty God was stuffed into a diaper. The Nourisher had to be nourished from His mother’s breast.

Striking! God wore our shoes…holes in the soles, scuffed toes and broken shoe strings.

It is empathizing with earthlings and understanding gained through experience. The Bible tells us that “he is touched with the feelings of our infirmities.” (Hebrews 4:15) It is stated like this in The Message. “We don’t have a priest who is out of touch with our reality.” He tasted death. He tottered under the weight of the Cross that He was forced to carry. He was tortured. He was treated with utmost disdain. He tolerated the scorn of friend and foe alike. He was tempted to betray God and sell out to the Devil. He walked in my shoes and looked at the world through my eyes.

I wish that we could capture the wonder and awe of the true meaning of Christmas as did the man who told Mark Twain, the author of Huckleberry Finn, that he wished he had never read Huckleberry Finn. The author was so dumb founded that he blurted out, “Why would you make such a remark?” Oh, what an answer he got back. “”I wish I had never read Huckleerry Finn before so that I could have the pleasure again of reading it for the first time.”

Look at Christmas all over again as if it were the first glimpse of the breath taking birth of the Son of God. We see Him in swaddling clothes, but in reality, it was God putting on my shoes and yours….this is what He saw.

When God looked at the world walking in my shoes, He discovered that God’s clock is not calibrated with mine.

His is on slow time and mine is on the fast track. He never seems to get in a hurry, but I stay in a hurry. As we edge closer and closer to Christmas, the disease of “hurry sickness” spreads like a huge, invisible plague. It’s almost like we never had an idea that December 25 was crawling into our schedule. Christmas rush has become a Christmas crush that crushes the joy right out of this hallowed day.

When Jesus put on my shoes, He saw the pressure of time first hand. He was informed that Lazarus, his special friend, was ill and perhaps critical. But He didn’t get in a hurry. Two days later, he meanders off to visit his friend in Bethany, but by the time He arrived, his friend Lazarus was dead, buried and his body in the process of decaying. He wasn’t quick enough by our standards, but when he wore my shoes, He also showed us that time is in His hand, and He can redo what lost time has undone.

Don’t worry about the clock, but learn to wait patiently upon God. He is always on time by His clock and never to late.

When God looks at the world walking in my shoes, He will quickly discover that it is difficult to see a purpose for pain when you are being blindsided by it.

Pain is a fact of life. You can’t ignore it or deny it. When God walked in my shoes He saw it, felt it and comforted others who were in it. He didn’t pull a grieving mother aside as she accompanied the dead body of her son to the cemetery and attempt to explain the purpose behind the pain. He didn’t scorn her sorrow or laugh at her loss. He experienced her pain and empathized with her grief.

Jesus is called “a man of sorrow” in Isaiah 53:3. In Heaven, He was a man of sovereignty, a man of supremacy, a man of sufficiency, self sufficient and self existent. But He BECAME a man of sorrow when He wore my shoes. God’s son knew no sin, but he knew all there was to know about sorrow. It is He, then, who will assume the role of drying all tears from our eyes when we get to heaven and whisper, “THERE WILL BE NO MORE SORROW OR PAIN.” (Revelation 21:4)

When God looks at the world walking in my shoes, He realizes that knowing that you are loved is the best treasure of all.

Mark Twain so eloquently declared, “Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”

When God wore my shoes, He left footprints of kindness and love on planet earth that time has not been able to erase.

Dr. Robert G. Lee, the eloquent preacher and lover of God, wrote about the treasure of God’s love. He said, “(It) breaks the fetters of slaves, takes the heat out of life’s fierce fever, the pain out of parting, the sting out of death and the gloom out of the grave.”

She was only eight years old and lived in an orphanage in Pennsylvania. She was shy, unattractive and regarded as a problem child. The director of the orphanage was trying to find a way to dispel her from their campus when they saw her writing a letter. Saying nothing to her, they allowed her to complete the task and see what she would do next.

Not surprising to them, she hid the letter and dashed out side and down the driveway to an old tree with roots sprawled out on top of the ground. Quickly she looked around, removed the letter and stuffed it into a crevice in one of the old roots and returned to her room.

Someone on the staff slipped down to the old tree and removed the letter and brought it back to the director. They were sure they would have the goods now to have her expelled, but to their surprise they found this tender note. “To anybody who finds this: I love you.”

That’s what Christ did when He came down here to wear my shoes. He left this little note that everyone needs to understand this Christmas….To anybody who finds this: I love you.

Merry Christmas!

Pastor Jimmy & Bob