If my trips to Israel have taught me anything, it is that I read the Bible with my westernized, Americanized, modernized thinking… and this probably causes me to not see what really happened 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem in all its power and truth. Yet, I don’t let what I’ve learned keep me from enjoying a good sugar cookie or setting up a wooden nativity barn. Instead, when I hear a song like my second favorite Christmas song, I let my mind travel back to those places I’ve visited as I let the singers tell me the story of the greatest birth ever in the way they know how.
My #2 top Christmas carol is of the modern variety. People have not been singing it for decades. In fact, many people may have never heard it. I’m obviously… and unashamedly… a believer in and follower of Jesus Christ. So songs by other Christians about the Savior and Friend I love so very much are what I naturally gravitate toward. Since this song is by a Christian group and has not been out a really long time, I would not expect most people to know it.
The song is called, “Come And See What’s Happening In The Barn,” and it’s performed by the Gaither Vocal Band. You can listen to it by clicking here.
Now, we don’t know that Joseph and his virgin-yet-pregnant fiancee’, Mary, arrived in Bethlehem the night before Jesus was born. And we cannot confirm that there were inns, or hotels, like we know them. We can’t even confirm whether the stable was more like a barn, or more like a cave. But what we do know is that Jesus was born to common people… in a common setting… yet in a most uncommon way. The night He was born, strange and miraculous things took place. That’s what this song reminds me of.
About 2/3 of the way into the song is where it really takes on life for me. When the person letting them use his stable realizes something significant is happening, and the shepherds encounter an angelic army choir heralding their Master’s arrival, I start getting chill bumps all over, and tears begin to brim in the edges of my eyes. I can’t help myself.
Oh, to have been there! No doubt, I would have been like the shepherds, who went and told everyone they could about what they had just experienced. Who wouldn’t have? Listening to this song takes me back… not necessarily to the Church of the Nativity, nor the Shepherds’ Grotto, which are both amazing to visit… but it transports me back through the millennia to an evening in the Middle East when God changed history forever.
I hope you’ve been enjoying this series of Top 5 Christmas Carols, and that it has caused you to think of those songs which move your heart toward the Christ of Christmas. Tomorrow, I will share with you the one Christmas song that always brings tears of joy to my eyes and causes my heart to swell with love for Jesus every time I listen to it. What’s my overall, favorite, top Christmas Carol of all time ever in the whole universe? Come back tomorrow, and find out! 😜
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