Starting Right
Starting Right is a 5 minute Day Starter to help keep you motivated, encouraged, and focused throughout your day. DannyMac is a pastor, teacher, motivational speaker, husband, and father. His years of leading and training people have given him vast experience in helping individuals to accomplish change in their lives and meet their goals. He can help you set the course for your day by offering practical advice from God's Word in a positive and fun way. There is no better way to begin your day than by Starting Right with DannyMac.
Starting Right
Small Town, Vast Hope: Why Bethlehem Still Matters
A quiet town, a long-echoed promise, and a melody that almost missed its moment—this five-minute journey explores how O Little Town of Bethlehem came to life and why it still carries weight today. We share the scene that shaped Philip Brooks’s words: a Christmas Eve ride to Bethlehem, a five-hour service in the Church of the Nativity, and the sound of hymns rolling like tides through the night. Then we follow the poem into music, as organist Lewis Redner wrestled with writer’s block until a sudden midnight melody unlocked a carol sung first by a small choir of teachers and children.
Along the way, we open the rarely printed stanza that places joy beside sorrow and invites charity and faith to hold the door wide. That small addition reframes the carol, moving it beyond nostalgia into a lived invitation to hope. We also trace the thread back to Micah 5:2, the ancient prophecy that points to Bethlehem and anchors the story of Jesus in a specific place and promise. Whether you come with faith or curiosity, the arc is compelling: a small village chosen for a large purpose, a song shaped by memory, and a message that meets real need.
Here is the youtube link for today
https://youtu.be/EHKORmpW4Cg?si=i2dfIXcMWXnCSbOw
Good morning and welcome to Starting Right with Danny Mack. I'm going to be here every Monday to Friday to help you get a great five-minute start to your day. So grab your cup of coffee, sit back, relax, and let me help you start your day right. Old Little Town of Bethlehem is one of the most well known and beloved of all the Christmas carols. It was written in 1868 by Philip Brooks, who was an Episcopalian minister from Philadelphia. In eighteen sixty five, when Phillips was thirty years old, he visited the Holy Land, and on december twenty fourth, he travelled by horseback from Jerusalem to attend a five hour Christmas Eve service at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. He was deeply moved by this experience, and later on he said I remember standing in the old church in Bethlehem, close to the spot where Jesus was born, when the whole church was singing hour after hour with splendid hymns of praise to God, and how again and again it seemed as if I could hear voices I knew well, telling each other of the wonderful night of the Savior's birth. In eighteen sixty seven, as he was preparing for the Christmas service in his home church, he wanted to write an original Christmas hymn for the children to sing during the program. He remembered that incredible night in Bethlehem, and he wrote a little poem of five stanzas and handed the words to his organist, Louis Redner. Lewis, he said, I would like you to write the tune for my poem, and if it's a good one, I'll name it Saint Louis after you. Louis tried, but he had a very difficult time putting music to this poem. Again and again he went back to Brooks saying, I don't have any inspiration. There's just nothing within me to do this. But finally on the night before the Christmas program, he woke up with the music ringing inside of his head. He wrote down the melody, then went back to sleep. The next day, a group of six Sunday school teachers and thirty six children, for the first time sang O Little Town of Bethlehem. Brooks was so pleased with the tune that he did indeed name it after his organist, changing the spelling of his last name so as not to embarrass him. There was also one more stanza originally written for this song, but it's usually omitted from our hymn books today. It says this where children pure and happy prayed to the blessed child, where misery cries out to thee, son of the mother mild where charity stands watching, and faith holds wide the door. The dark night wakes, the glory breaks, and Christmas comes once more. In the book of Micah, chapter five and verse two, there is a powerful and startling revelation about what's going to take place in that small town. God is speaking, and he says, But you, O Bethlehem, are only a small village among all the people of Judah, yet a ruler of Israel, whose origins are in the distant past, will come from you on my behalf. This beautiful prophecy written some five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, is one of many that were fulfilled by the birth, the life, and the death of Jesus. Each one of these prophecies had to be fulfilled. They had to come true in order for Christ to be able to claim that He is the Son of God and that He is the Savior of mankind. Jesus came to this earth to fulfill those prophecies, to live and to die so that we could have a relationship with God. Jesus was and is the hope for humanity. It's so important that we hang on to Christmas, the true message of Christmas, that we don't let anybody take it away or erase it or remove it from our calendars. Jesus Christ changed the world when he was born, and he can still change the world today. He is our hope, he is our light, and he is our savior. I'm gonna leave you today with my favorite version of O Little Town of Bethlehem, sung by Nat King Cole. If you'd like to hear his entire version, the YouTube link will be in your show notes today. You can click on that and listen to it. Take care everybody. I hope you have a wonderful week. And here's Nat King Cole with O Little Town of Bethlehem.
SPEAKER_01:How still we see the law.
