Missed Christmas

Matthew 2:1 NIV

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem

What Should You Expect of People?

I was substitute teaching in a sixth grade class and one of the students walked past me after recess and I could tell she was quite upset.  In fact, nearly everyone in the class noticed it.  I pulled her aside and asked what was wrong.  At first, she wouldn’t say, but then a tear or two trickled down her cheek and she told me what happened.  She was playing in a four-square game and some of the kids told her she had gotten out.  She told them she wasn’t, and they made fun of her and yelled for her to leave the square and go to the end of the line.  Humiliated and feeling wronged, she just quit the game and waited for recess to end.  I didn’t have any wise counsel for the child, now suggestions.  Because I was not there, I could not even be certain her side of the story was accurate or not.  What I did know was that the student was a bit heart-broken and I had no real strategy for consoling her.

It of course makes no sense for children to get upset while playing a game intended to be fun but there are many times when what is done isn’t reasonable.  The problem we face is that we do not live in a reasonable world.  We see examples of this time and again.  My son was recently in a car accident and his car was totaled when a car and a pickup truck collided on the freeway and the truck spun out and hit my son’s car, sending his car into a guard rail.  Now, the insurance companies for both drivers are refusing to pay for the damages to my son’s car because each driver claims the other was at fault.  This of course is not reasonable because now lawyers will have to be paid to help settle this.  Elvis Pressley was well-known for taking a gun and blasting TV sets when he didn’t like the show he was watching.  The shoe company Puma was formed because the two brothers who created the Adidas company had a violent falling out and one brother, Rudolf, left Adidas and formed Puma.  For twenty-seven years, the two brothers battled over market share and did not talk to each other the rest of their lives.  This is not reasonable.  The cofounding brothers of Kellogg cereals became so angry with each other that they sued each other for more than a decade and did not talk to each other for thirty-three years.  The world is not reasonable and much of what happens in your home and mine isn’t either.  We do things that don’t make sense even though we know better.

When the shepherds Christmas Eve saw the angels up in the sky singing praise to God, they immediately, as soon as the angels left them, ran off to follow the instruction to go find the newborn baby Jesus lying in a manger.  Like me and you would have been, they were amazed at the sight of the prophesied Messiah born in their town and it catapulted them to action.  When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. (Luke 2:17-18 NIV) It is most interesting in this account what is not said here.  No mention is made of anyone else going to see Jesus.  There was no parade of worshippers heading down to the stable to see the King of Kings.  Everyone that heard the shepherds’ story was amazed, but it does not seem that anyone followed the example of the shepherds and went to see the baby “lying in a manger”.  It was not that big of a deal for them to leave their homes, quit making dinner, stop doing their chores to make it out to the place where Jesus and Mary and Joseph rested.

Now the other Gospel writer who talks about the baby Jesus, Matthew, also makes it clear that no one made any sort of fuss about seeing the Lord Jesus.  In fact, it seems that the birth of Jesus went completely unnoticed by the world at large.  When the Magi from the east came to see the King of the Jews because they had been led to Israel by the great star, no one in Jerusalem, which is only a few miles from Bethlehem, knew anything about the miracle of Jesus.  King Herod, who was paranoid about any threat to his rule immediately became alarmed when the Magi came to him wondering where the newborn King of the Jews was to be found.  After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, "Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him."  When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. (Matthew 2:1-3 NIV)

Herod quickly called for the Bible scholars of Jerusalem to come and tell him what the Scriptures had to say about the birth of the Messiah.  "In Bethlehem in Judea," they replied, "for this is what the prophet has written: "'But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a ruler who will be the shepherd of my people Israel.'" (Matthew 2:5-6 NIV)  What is astounding about this record of the birth of Jesus and the events surrounding it is that even after Herod and all those in court found out what the Bible said was the location of where the Messiah would be born, not one of them went themselves to see Him.  Not a single scholar bothered to hike down with the Magi and go see what might have happened.  Despite the star, despite the account of the shepherds, despite the coming of the Magi, not a solitary soul explored the possibility that the long awaited and anticipated Messiah was actually in their midst.

We have expectations of others and set standards that we think they should reach and they all too often fail us.  They don’t love us like we think they ought, they aren’t honest with us, they don’t work very hard or put the effort into their endeavors we hoped they would.  Friends and family members do mean things, are selfish and get easily offended, they aren’t faithful, they sin in ugly ways and embarrass us.  I have good Christian friends who are sad because of what their children are doing.  Some have cried when they told me about the awful choices their sons and daughters are making.  The writer of Ecclesiastes wrote, If you see the poor oppressed in a district, and justice and rights denied, do not be surprised at such things; (Ecclesiastes 5:8 NIV) We should never be surprised when someone we love falls into an immoral lifestyle, a politician lies to us or a close friend stops talking to us.  This is a broken world and every person we know is corrupted by sin and damaged by it.  Christian people have old habits of sinning that have not yet been turned around and many are emotionally and psychologically damaged by sin and its destructive force.  Should anything evil in this world surprise us?

Each of us need Christ to take away our sin.  We need His perfect life worked into us so that we can be thoroughly transformed and made Christian.  When salvation is typically described, it almost always is spoken of as getting to heaven.  Salvation is much more than that.  It is Christ becoming a part of you and working out of you all the sin and making you perfect in every way.  That is why all people on this planet need Christ as Savior.   Sin cannot be removed from them any other way.

How Are You Doing Your Calculations?

Our time is one of great interest in supernatural activity and powers.  And yet we explore it not as Columbus or Magellan did looking for something actual and determinable but as creators who let our imaginings do all the work of it.  We are entertained by thoughts of the supernatural but we don't take it seriously.   Jesus on the other hand lived within the reality of unseen forces and personalities and He both attacked and allied Himself with them.  Demons He cast out of people and angels He let serve and nourish Him.  At one time we treated the atom as a straight forward and quite logical entity until we discovered the wild unpredictability of electrons and subatomic particles.  When will we face facts?  Our personalities are far more complex and unreliable than the field of psychology can reckon because there are unseen forces and beings that wreak havoc upon us and interject themselves in every nook and cranny of our lives.  Paul spoke of doing things without predictability or self-control and we should give this credence too, not because the seen world is so at variance with logical outcomes but because the unseen world is far more vast and influential than we grasp.  How often has our Lord told us to pray?  Do we take at all seriously this grave command?  Do we realize how critical prayer is to us and to all those who surround us?  Jesus did not quiver over the unseen world but He didn't calculate without taking it into account either.  He showed us how to respond to supernatural surroundings and it was the simplest of all strategies.  Pray.  Pray for direction.  Pray for help.  Pray for protection.  Pray for eyes to see what is beyond the senses.  Pray for reactions that can handle the split second changes in direction caused by supernatural forces, both demonic and angelic, that impose their wills upon our circumstances.  If it is not warfare at the highest levels, do you think Jesus would have agonized as He did in the Garden of Gethsemane?

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.  Ephesians 6: 12 NIV

Are You Aware of the Big Picture?

There is with each of us a great mountain of unexplored territory.  Our personality is beyond our grasp, even the smallest parts of it.  That is why egotism is such a dastardly sin against ourselves because what we think we are is so far from the actuality.  Just consider your dreams and how profoundly they explore your depths.  You dream of someone you cannot recall ever seeing, create a narrative that is far more complex with plots and subplots than anything you could ever put down in writing, express fears and colossal desires you did not know existed.    In your dreams, lusts and cravings spring up from the pit of you that astound and perplex you.  That is just the brief snippets of the dreams you recall after the first minute of waking.  The boundaries of you that are versus what you think those boundaries of you are far surpass the difference between all of Asia and the little mosquito dancing near a swamp in Viet Nam.  You are not merely the sum of your parts…you go beyond all your parts and all the parts of everyone you know of those you have met over the course of your life.  The shepherds were amazed by the angels…first one and then thousands because they never imagined something so wonderful and spectacular.  Come to Jesus and you will find that what you know of Him and what you think you know of Him is even less than what you know of yourself.  Consider the wonder and awe of those first moments when the shepherds looked up into the night sky and watched the heavenly dance played out above them.  They could not have realized that what the angels announced was so much greater than what they presented of themselves.  Why are we so dreary and lackadaisical when it comes to knowing Jesus Christ?  We seem to be like the poor man who smashed his TV to get at the little people who lived in his box and talked to him from inside it..  Can we not see that Jesus Christ is mercy and love and joy beyond our wildest imaginings and that the glory of His being is the most magnificent of discoveries and one that brightens exponentially with each new exploration into Him?  Have we the persistence of the shepherds who scrambled to see the Christ Christmas morning?  Have we an idea of what consists of the “big picture“?  Do we realize how big Jesus is?

So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.      Luke 2:16 NIV

Dense Lives

Given the density of so many lives, how is it that we would expect God to supernaturally maneuver among us?  The cry for God is nearly universal.  It is just that expectations have been so diminished by failure to encounter Him on our terms  that we schedule ourselves senseless.  The irony of our discouraged indifference is that we scurry about trying to find what in a moment the Lord Jesus Christ can give us.  Imagine the poor widow of Jesus' parable sweeping out her neighbor's house trying to find her missing coin or going down to the park with her back bent over, her eyes frantically scanning the ground for any sign of it among the shrubs.  The distressed poor soul would have been a fool to go out of the country hoping to find the coin in some far off land.  What she did was sheer genius!  She went into her own home and turned everything upside down there.  Is it any wonder that we have had such a disastrous go at this matter of "finding" God when we have gone hither and thither without our wits engaged at all?  The Lord Jesus Christ told the Pharisees that the Kingdom of God was right there with them...it had never been anywhere else and was not disappearing any time soon.  Our frantic chase after something, anything that can match the Presence of God right where we are is pitiful.  Give God enough space in your chaotic mind to meet with you!   Nothing screams more loudly than the wills and whims of the cascading world falling all about us.  The shepherds simply sat where they were in the stillness of the night and God met them there.  The Magi scanned the heavens for some hint of His presence and God met them too.  The disoriented woman at the well stayed long enough at her normal work station to give God a shot at speaking to her there.  Have we discouraged the Savior's efforts at getting through to us because we have been derelict in the one duty we have been given…"wait…"?  Your most productive moment of your day is the point at which you wait for God to wiggle His way into you.  You may not have a marvelous revelation, a fascinating insight but you could gain the sudden influx of Holy Spirit Presence that will re-calibrate your inner core so that God can orient you rightly.  You most likely will not see a blaze of starlight or a vibrant band of angels but you could know how to manage that barking child or gain peace over that tormenting debt.  Your Savior is your Savior.  If you wait upon Him long enough, He will get you through your turmoil with your joy intact.  Isn't that worth something?

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the

Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.  Psalm  27:14 NIV

Forgetting Where We Are

We have bought into the proposition that everything is natural and random, originating in the mindlessness of circumstance.  Even as far back as the exodus out of Egypt the presence and activity of God was lost on the exiting Israelites.  When Pharaoh and his army of charioteers barreled down upon the encamped Israelites, the half-crazed Hebrews lost their minds over the perceived danger they faced.  It was as if they had forgotten altogether the plagues upon the livestock and the deadly hailstorm and the deaths of the firstborn; all of which did not touch them but ripped into the Egyptians.  If the Israelites could be oblivious to the hand of God back then given their experience with His work, it is not unreasonable that this same sociological circumstance would be present today.  The mob reacts to every bit and parcel of circumstance as bad luck, good fortune or the natural outcome of hard work and ingenuity.  The Holy Spirit alone brings to light the absolute and constant interplay of God within our world.  If Israel could stare at the photograph of God's intervention and see nothing, how likely is it that we will see it.  We must rely upon Holy Spirit to part the curtain as it were and make it so we  recognize all the ways our Lord is working in and among us.  Only then can we rest peacefully as we do our work and make our plans and evaluate our situation.  Nothing frustrates our joy more than the blackened goggles we stretch across our eyes given us by Satan to block out our discernment of what is really happening.  Satan cannot inhibit our view of God; he can only encourage us to block Him out of our sight.  You must choose to see God right there with you when you drop the dinner on the floor or your stocks tumble off the table.  You can see Him if you will look with Holy Spirit fixing your mind on what it should be noticing.  The worst of your day is never lost in circumstance...it is just as surrounded by angels as the shepherds who watched their sheep at night.  At no point have you been overtaken by your troubles and hardships...you are in just as good a place as Israel standing before the Red Sea.

"...It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!"   Exodus 14:12NIV