When Nonessentials Displace Essentials
“After the celebration was over, they started home to Nazareth, but Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents didn’t miss him at first, because they assumed he was among the other travelers. But when he didn’t show up that evening, they started looking for him among their relatives and friends.” (Luke 2:43-44)
We know little about the childhood of Jesus. What we do know is that He was raised in Nazareth. We know that Joseph was a carpenter, so he most likely also trained Jesus to be a carpenter.
But Jesus was also schooled in the Scriptures, and He observed the Law. In fact, Luke’s gospel tells us that every year, Mary and Joseph went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. But one year, when Jesus was twelve, Mary and Joseph somehow lost track of His whereabouts.
If you’ve ever lost sight of a child somewhere, then you know that feeling of terror that grips you when you realize you’ve lost sight of the child. Now, we might think that Jesus would have been quite easy to find because whenever we see Him depicted in religious art, He has a halo.
But Jesus didn’t have a halo. He looked like everyone else. The Bible says of Him, “He has no form or comeliness” (Isaiah 53:2). In other words, he was an ordinary-looking kind of guy. He didn’t stand out from the crowd in terms of His physical looks.
After a frantic search, Mary and Joseph finally found Jesus in the Temple, where He was reasoning with the leaders.
Mary and Joseph had traveled an entire day before they missed Him. They had breakfast, lunch, and dinner and never once saw His face through all those. They hadn’t lost their love for Him. Nor had they lost their faith. But they lost Him. Literally.
The same thing can happen to us. We can go through a morning, afternoon, and evening without a single thought about God, without a single moment given to prayer or reading the Bible. It just isn’t part of our day-to-day routine. And very easily, God’s only begotten Son can become God’s only forgotten Son. We lose Jesus when nonessentials displace essentials in our lives.
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