For many people the Christmas carols bring about some of the happiest and fondest memories of their childhood.In part that's because the carols have simply become common place in our culture. For many, there's nothing theologically significant about them...there's just songs that go with the occasion playing in malls, just like there's a whole set of songs you hear only at weddings.

"O Little Town of Bethlehem" is one of those Christmas songs. Artists who are all over the map have recorded renditions of it. Everyone from Elvis Presley to Bob Dylan to Toby Keith to Mariah Carey and even Bright Eyes and Belle and Sebastian have a version of it. There are 28 professional recording artists who have laid down tracks for O Little Town of Bethlehem. And whether they know it or know, the carol is rich with theological truth.

Bethlehem has always been a little town. Even now, it only has about 30,000 people who live there. Guesses for the first century are around 3,000 people. It was just a tiny little village about 5-6 miles south of Jerusalem. Bethlehem's reputation has always been known as a small little town...it's just like a little blip on the map. 

It's sort of like Fallbrook in San Diego.  You don't even realize it's there until you've driven past it. But if you actually drive into the town there's like one street with a few stores on it and usually people riding around on horses. If you've never heard of Fallbrook, that's just a sign of how small it is...it's this little tiny town about thirty minutes north of downtown San Diego..

Bethlehem is an infinitesimal insignificant little place...really until Jesus is born. People knew it was where King David was born but other than that nothing really notable ever happened there. 

In the similar way, each of us are like small little seemingly insignificant town, who have something great happen in them when Jesus comes home to our hearts.

The analogy in the carol is this. The earth, the world, is sinful and gone bad...full of fighting and wickedness, and God comes to this world of sin and is born in Bethlehem. In the same way our hearts are sinful and gone bad...full of fighting against God, conflicting desires, seeking and serving ourselves and lacking love for others. We need Christ to enter our hearts and our lives just as he entered the womb of Mary and the stable of Bethlehem.

It requires such humbling of the heart to be broken down to a place before God where we acknowledge we have need, call out to God and invite Him in. Too often we don’t have room, there’s no room in the inn of our hearts which get full of so many other things.  When we surrender them to God, there’s room and He enters in.  Jesus is the "wonderous gift" who comes into the Bethlehem of our lives as the "blessing of heaven."