There’s a Victorian house in the heart of St. Paul, MN that was built in 1889 and then purchased by newlyweds in 1983. The house had been converted to 6 apartments, and the couple spent years bringing the house back to the original one-family dwelling. They spent hours researching the time period and then even more time working with their own hands– sanding and stripping wood to bring back the original floors and banisters, searching for wall paper and furnishings for the time period, and living in less-than-comfortable conditions as the bathrooms and kitchens were worked on. It is a beautiful home, and I am proud of the work that my aunt and uncle put into this home. The “builder of the house has great honor”.

It is easy for us to look at man-made work with honor and respect, forgetting that everything that we do, even our “best work”, is tainted with sin. There is nothing that we do that is without sin. We complain about the work we have to do, or covet the skills or means of others, or we get weary and only do the bare minimum. God is faithful; we are not.

God wants us to focus our eyes not on our earthly home, but our heavenly home. He wants us to honor not the builders of things in this world, but the “builder of everything”. The creator is superior to his creatures. God made the world, and when his creation was destroyed by sin, he made a plan. God, the “builder of everything”, made a blueprint for our salvation, a path to heaven. His plan was to give us a Christmas miracle, a tiny baby that would live the faithful life that we cannot, and then take on the sins of the entire world that he created.

God wants us to “fix our eyes on Jesus”, the ONE that saved us from our big problem of sin. God has absolute authority over heaven and earth, and he sent his son, Jesus, to destroy the sin in this world and in our hearts.