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    Who Is This Child?: From Common Babe to King of Kings
    Who Is This Child?: From Common Babe to King of Kings
    Who Is This Child?: From Common Babe to King of Kings
    Ebook35 pages28 minutes

    Who Is This Child?: From Common Babe to King of Kings

    By John Ortberg

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    The child in Bethlehem would grow up to be a friend of sinners, not a friend of Rome. He would spend his life with the ordinary and the unimpressive. He would pay deep attention to lepers and cripples, to the blind and the beggar, to prostitutes and fishermen, to women and children. He would announce the availability of a kingdom different from Herod’s. A kingdom where blessings—full value and worth with God—was now conferred on the poor in spirit and the meek and the persecuted.

    People would not understand all this meant. According to pastor and bestselling author John Ortberg in Who Is This Child, we still do not.

    But a revolution was starting, a slow, quiet, movement that began at the bottom of society and would undermine the pretensions of the Herods. It was a movement that was largely underground, like a cave around Bethlehem, where a dangerous baby was born and hidden from a king.

    Strange reversal. Men who wore purple robes and glittering crowns and gaudy titles began to look ridiculous. And yet the figure of the child born in a manger only grew in stature. Adapted from John Ortberg’s book, Who Is This Man?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherZondervan
    Release dateOct 2, 2012
    ISBN9780310327097
    Who Is This Child?: From Common Babe to King of Kings
    Author

    John Ortberg

    John Ortberg is the senior pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church (MPPC) in the San Francisco Bay Area. His bestselling books include Soul Keeping, Who Is This Man?, and If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat. John teaches around the world at conferences and churches, writes articles for Christianity Today and Leadership Journal, and is on the board of the Dallas Willard Center and Fuller Seminary. He has preached sermons on Abraham Lincoln, The LEGO Movie, and The Gospel According to Les Miserables. John and his wife Nancy enjoy spending time with their three adult children, dog Baxter, and surfing the Pacific. You can follow John on twitter @johnortberg or check out the latest news/blogs on his website at www.johnortberg.com.

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      Book preview

      Who Is This Child? - John Ortberg

      WHO IS THIS CHILD?

      From Common Babe

      to King of Kings

      JOHN ORTBERG

      Contents

      Cover

      Title Page

      The Mother

      The Child

      Sources

      About the Author

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      Share Your Thoughts

      The Mother

      Before we get into the story of the one who comes at Christmas, and who he really was, I want to take you into a prelude — a prelude that is the story about the one person who knew him best: Mary, his mother. Mary’s story is about a song she sang, before the Christmas night, when Gabriel came to her in the sixth month of her pregnancy. The song shows that of all people, she got it,—what was about to happen. This is the lead-up to the Christmas event. And the two characters most in view were seen as being the least, with the least to give: a mother and a baby child.

      So Mary composed the very first song ever inspired by the birth of Jesus. It is maybe the most influential song ever written. Maybe the most profound. It was written by a girl who was probably fifteen years old.

      Yet the capacity of both her mind and spirit, and the amazing fact of the Son she carried and raised, means that Mary’s song can change your attitude and mindset and life — on Christmas day or any other. But the song did not begin well.

      When the angel Gabriel told Mary that she was going to have a child, this was not welcome news. She was engaged to Joseph but not married. She would be an unwed pregnant teenage girl. She did not know at that point how it would turn out.

      Joseph could reject Mary. She could be subject to stoning; according to Torah, that’s what was supposed to happen. For sure, as someone who

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