A Christmas story: An old man with a hunch

The entire supporting cast of the Christmas story were common folk: shepherds, innkeepers, an old man with a hunch.

We know very little about this old man with a hunch: what tribe he was from, what he did for a living. We just know he was righteous and devout, and ...

... and he had a hunch: I’m not going to die until I see the Messiah.

Meet Simeon.

Of course, because Luke has now told us Simeon's story – because the Messiah did come in his lifetime and proved his hunch right – we think of Simeon as a special man.

"Wow," we say, "God spoke to him. How does that work?"

But when his story was playing out in real time, Simeon was a common, unknown person -- just like us.

More and more I am impressed that walking and talking with the Lord Jesus “real time” is often no more than a hunch – a deep, quietly assuring sense, yes, but if you tell anybody about it, they may well say it’s a hunch – it is often no more than a hunch.

Only afterwards, when others tell your story, do they say, “you know, the Lord must have really spoke to him about that.” Or: “Then God led him to do such and such; it was a God-thing.” And once it is reported like that, then everybody says: The Spirit told him to do it! He was LED of the Spirit!

And then we think of the person as special: Oooh he hears from God! And then we say, “Why don’t I hear from God?”

And we don’t realize that some of those “hunches” we get is the still small voice of the Holy Spirit.

Logos2Go

Luke 2.25-29 Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. And he came in the Spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him according to the custom of the Law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, “Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word...