“The real Jesus attracted failures, exiles, rejects, underachievers, weaklings, compromisers, and losers - the scum of the earth. Every kind of defeated, fed-up sinner found a welcome with him.”
That’s a quote from Ray Ortlund that sums up the message of the song, “The Unexpected Ones.” While this is true for the grown-up life of Jesus, it’s also true from the very beginning of his arrival here on the earth - his birth. At this point, we might be so used to our nativity scenes that we forget the significance of what they are telling us. Gathered around this God-child are the poor, the despised, the young and inexperienced - these are not the characters we would expect to be main characters in the birth of a King, much less the King of kings. Seeing the characters gathered around the birth of Christ tells us something about this Christ and about God. It foreshadows the story of Christ as a man - preparing us for the fact that Jesus came to serve, he came to seek and save the lost, and he came for the sick, not the well.
We’re going to dive deeper into this theme around the song The Unexpected Ones on today’s podcast as we talk about how this song came to life. I hope you’ll join us, and if you do, I hope that it compels you to draw near to Jesus. Let’s dive in.
