We picture the angels singing before the shepherds.  We can feel the silent reverie of the cave barn.  We are pierced by the cries of a young girl in loneliness birthing the Son who would make sure the rest of us never have to be lonely again.  These images of the occasion could have been seen, felt, and heard.  But there is one sound that overshadowed them all on that first Christmas night.

For centuries past God had been accumulating a mass of promises over humanity.  He had told them through prophets, through women and men, in psalms and songs and oral tradition.  He had built a complete picture in promises.  He was sending us Help.  Salvation was on the wings of the wind of His Word.  A Deliverer would come for us. 

But until that night, the world stood waiting to know whether all the talk would become reality, if this God was indeed One of His Word.  While He had made promises before-to men, women, even nations-this one was different.  The Answer was for us all.  It was distinct and unthinkable.  It was so brilliant and yet so impossible to fathom. 

While the mother cried and the shepherds shook and the angels glorified, the heavens roared the loudest.  In that one night, the God of all creation, the King of Kings and eternal Lord of Lords boomed from the heavens a resounding, powerful, guttural, and forever “Yes” in Christ. 

Every promise fulfilled to perfection.  Every claim proven to have been valid. 

On that night, with the birth of a Child who would change all eternity, God shouted across the annals of human history a proclamation of such profound and impactful force every realm of life would quake at His bellow:  I AM Faithful.

There are sweet and tender gifts at the heart of Christmas and then there are those that seem harsh at first blush.  These take on their beauty in perspective.

Before The Baby, there was a baby in this Christmas story.  John’s birth was a miracle and blessing.  Zechariah and Elizabeth had longed for this son and, surely, rejoiced and reveled in his coming.  But then there’s a little aside.

It is said they were ‘advanced in age’ when John was born.  It is also said that John grew up in the wilderness.  Logic might have us put these together and assume that he grew up in the wilderness because his aged parents weren’t around long enough for him to ‘grow up’ with them. 

They held their blessing for only a little while.

In the Christmas story there is this tension that we can’t avoid—the night ended, the morning came, the crazy guy sent his minions, real life wouldn’t relent.  Temporal life will not be denied it’s fleeting thievery. 

It seems the temporal way is like that—what we long for most seems to be gone too quickly, what we have plenty of we eventually reason we don’t want any more.  Human existence is simply not meant to last.

Now we see in a mirror dimly what we will then see face to face. 

I Corinthians 13:12

Hidden in the story of Christmas is a reminder that all the greatness we long for and hold dear here is just a dim reflection of the real thing that is being held for us.  The nearness we long for, the Baby that came, He grew up and died and rose and ascended.  The Holy Spirit was left for us, but as a deposit.  The flesh and blood and warmth and light,-the access-that is in holding for a future day. 

Zechariah and Elizabeth model for us delight in the blessings of today while holding dearest the Blessing of tomorrow.  They remind us that the trappings of this temporal life are not the gift but a foretaste of the ‘face to face’ life which will be ours always.  They give us a new perspective about the fleeting nature of the treasures we hold and lose.

In the beauty of this season we are told of the true beauty that is yet to be.  And in so knowing, we hold life loosely; loving the babies we hold and the treasures we so easily cling to.  Knowing they are but a dim reflection of their truest existence, a breath of the long sigh that will be our eternal reality in Christ.

While it is at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, it is at the name Immanuel that every heart saw the Image of it’s greatest longing: nearness. 

While He came to earth as a baby, the emphasis, the impact of Christmas-that part that moves and impassions us, fills and transforms us-isn’t that He was an infant but that that infant came NEAR.  What was separate and untouchable could be beheld.  Loved.  Touched.  Known.  Real.  Present. 

What is more approachable than a baby?  More unconditionally loving, warming, close, near?  The Baby is a metaphor!  A living picture of the greatest longing of every human heart.  What we want is that which a baby epitomizes.  We want to draw near, feel the warmth, the sweet tenderness, the approachable surrender and innocence that everything else seems to lack.  We want One who will be all that to us. And we spend our lives longing for the Baby to be close enough to warm our lives by.

That’s why Christmas is so powerful, so moving, so reverent.  Because in it that longing all humanity knew and harbored finally emerged from the clouds and shadows, it took shape and threw back the veil of uncertainty and desire.

We knew we longed for something but knew not quite what it was. 

In Christmas, our longing took it’s form, it stepped out of it’s cloak of mystery and bore a name:  Immanuel, He is near.

That’s why it’s a big deal.  That’s why we celebrate Christmas big like Easter, or why we should.  That’s why it’s worth recounting and retelling year after year.  Because at Christmas God finally unveiled what we all are searching for; He sent IT in a glimpse, a foreshadowing, a taste in human years of a reality in eternal assurance.  Nearness.  A forever of together.  The one thing we really just can’t live without:  HIM near me.  Always.

It’s not been a pleasant absence from you all.  Actually, at this moment, I’m supposed to be sitting here writing a thank you note for all those who ministered to my family so well in the weeks of my mom’s sickness and days of her death last week.  Clearly that’s not what I’m up to tonight. 

I have Christmas music playing and the house lit wonderfully festive (thanks to some of those amazing souls who ministered to me by decorating my home) and yet there’s a numbness in my soul at the moment. 

Thankfully, God got a jump on things for me and had me teach a Christmas series very early in the holiday calendar.  In that study and time with Him, Christmas took on a whole new meaning it never had before.  Perhaps I will begin this Christmas journey there—for you and for me.  It is in the beauty of Christmas that God will lead and carry me. Perhaps I can write-or is it right- the healing here.

I’ve always seemed to grasp Easter.  It’s far less revered, shorter in duration, less ‘festive,’ and yet far easier to understand for its significance. Easter makes sense.  It’s on the cross that death and Hell were defeated.  It’s in His offering that my eternity was secured.  It’s in that Passion week that He put the pin in my redemption and release.  That I get.

But Christmas.  Christmas has usually eluded me.  It seems like it should be this big deal of such monumental significance to believers.  And, yet, year after year, the grandeur of it all escapes me.  I end the season wondering how it is I’ve missed it again. 

I’ve come to see that the reason I keep missing it is because I’m not quite sure what I’m looking for.  Like a child expecting the biggest or brightest gift under the tree, I go looking fervently for I know not what.  And, thus, the gift eludes me; unfound, unsavored, unopened.  Again. 

Christmas is not simply the necessary precursor to Easter, great for what it meant would be.  It is great for what it was.  And I truly believe churches the world over have failed to see or define it.  We talk about the baby and the cross and the joy and the shepherds and the virgin and the angels and somehow the sweetness of the Man Child is supposed to move us to the depths of our spirit.  But sweet scenes, like idyllic settings, fade from significance rather quickly after they are passed. 

Christmas must have a significance of its own—not for what it made possible later, but for what it brought in that night.  Why is Christmas not just a big deal to department stores and children, to midnight mass goers and candlelight service participants, but to me?  Now and later, year after year.  Not just because His birth was necessary that His death might follow. 

Was Christmas just a tender and touching story of someone faithful long ago?  Is it meaningful to me in some way that can move and shape me today, not for the biological necessity of birth preceding death but for life in me now?  Why does God have us bring this story to remembrance with such pomp and stance over and over and over? Is there a message here I’ve been missing all my life?

Yes.

Christmas is more than Easter’s forerunner.  It is more than the first step in the plan to rescue me.  It is enough even if Easter isn’t thrown in.  It is beautiful and life-giving and to dismiss what it is in favor of what it would bring is to miss the greatest gift under the tree this season. 

Let’s find out what the present looks like so none of us miss unwrapping its greatness this year.

Revelation 10 begins with a vivid description of a “mighty angel” who, in my mind’s eye, is larger than life and terrifying in appearance.  He’s said to be wrapped in a cloud, have a rainbow over his head, have a face like the sun, and have legs that look like pillars of fire.  To add to this wild imagery, he stands with one foot on the sea and the other on the land.  He appears to be far larger than any human, beast, or being I know of.  Oh yeah, and his voice is super loud and sounds like a lion roaring.  Little scary, not gonna lie. 

So we see the picture, big scary angel so bright and blazing you can’t either look or look away. 

Fast forward a few verses.  Enter John. 

Then the voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me again, saying, “Go, take the scroll that is open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.”  SO I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll.       Revelation 10:8-9

So. 

The voice from heaven said do it SO.  He said do it SO I did it.  Seems simple enough.  But is it?

I don’t seem to live like it’s so simple.  Actually, I feel like this theme keeps replaying.  He says do it SO.  So why is it so hard to do, and why don’t I just do it more often?  Forget how difficult I find it to hear Him in the first place! 

Now back to the beginning.  The one to whom John walked up and so authoritatively asked for the scroll was this same mighty angel we had so clearly pictured in our minds just moments ago.  He’s scary.  He’s huge.  He looks like he’s radiating heat and sounds like he could eat me whole.  And yet John just does it.  He was told to do it and SO he did.  It doesn’t even seem to matter that what he’s being asked to do is frightening or bizarre or unexplained or even life threatening.

Don’t know why I find this so fascinating, but I do.  Perhaps it’s envy because I long to have things be so simple in my obedience.  I can’t even seem to ‘SO’ do what He’s already plainly said to do much less the crazy little extras He likely asks of me daily.  

You speak, Lord.  We listen and hear You.  And SO we do what we’re told. 

Let’s aim for that, shall we.

Genesis 22 tells the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac at the Lord’s request.  A few points to note:  Isaac was, at that time, old enough to make a three-day wilderness journey with grown men (22:4).  He was also able to carry enough wood to burn a good fire to a place that was considered “afar” (22:4b, 6).  Abraham, in turn, was a number of years beyond 100 year’s old.

{Just an FYI, he was presumably under age 137, as that was his age at Sarah death (23:1), but clearly over 100, as that was his age at Isaac’s birth (21:5).  Abraham died at age 175 himself (25:7)}

While it is noted that Abraham “bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar,” if I’m picturing these guys, I kind of have some questions come to mind. 

IF Isaac was strong enough to make the journey and carry the wood, was he not strong enough to fight off his aged dad as he attempted to bind and kill him?

I think he was.

We really aren’t told tons and tons about Isaac and his choices.  The only story we really know is one that was often told of his dad too—he had his good-looking wife lie and say she was his sister instead of his wife.  And then, of course, when he was blind and old he was duped by his own kid into giving valuable stuff to people for whom it wasn’t intended. Can’t say there’s much too shady about Isaac in all that.

Abraham’s sacrifice story is pretty much always about Abraham.  This was his big faith moment, his line in the sand, his bold stand on God’s side. 

But there were two people at that altar.  How did Isaac fit?  If he was old enough, strong enough, to travel hard and carry much, if his ‘contender’ was a pretty old guy, what might we discern of him that he allowed himself to be bound and laid upon an altar with a knife above his heart?

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.    Romans 12:1

He had to have let him do it. 

While Abraham was willing to offer his son, Isaac was willing to let him.  And that willingness had to have looked like laying down on an altar  and surrendering to the will of God as perceived by his godly dad.  (The binding was probably more for instinct or impulse concerns as much as anything.)

We too are called to lay our lives down, again and again every day climbing up on that altar of sacrifice, and willingly conceding to the will of God. 

I’m a visual person.  And when I close my eyes and watch the scene of this surrender take place, I confirm and solidify my own desire and conviction to give myself up there, to not fight against the will of the One who calls me to give it all.  Honestly, sometimes it looks like an altar that I climb up on to.  But as many times as not, it looks like this warm, welcoming, protective, and tender set of hands into which I lay myself.  Such is the nature of a life willingly sacrificed to their Father’s will. Such is the offering of an obedient child to their worthy Father.   

I don’t see how Isaac wasn’t complicit in this offering.  It wasn’t just Abraham who willingly gave.  Isaac surrendered himself to the offering and he couldn’t have fought too hard against it. 

May we do the same.  Every day.

There’s a wonderful yet poorly named mission trip preparation series called Help, I’m Going on a Short Term Mission Trip!  (Told you it was poorly named.)  Despite the name, it’s an amazing book.  One aspect that is covered is the need for any short-term missionary to discern who all belongs on their team.  I love the way the write approaches this.  He calls it Support Discovery.

The idea is that the right people are waiting to make up your team and you must pray and approach the Lord and then discerningly assemble that team.  What a profound approach to so much more than missions.

Today I have worked on a Bible study lesson.  I could approach that as an attempt to ‘come up with’ a good and applicable lesson.  Or I could realize that God already has something He’d like to say and I just have to DISCOVER what that is and say that. 

The cliched verse rings true:

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”             Jeremiah 29:11

While we so often quote this verse to graduates, there’s a new wisdom here for us. 

If God knows the plans He has and God has already charted a course for our days, why on earth do I expend my energy with some life-map of sorts before me attempting to chart that good course myself?  I don’t need to find a new world, I just need to discover the one He’s already mapped out. 

We so often think we have to figure things out, come up with good plans, invent new wonders, create powerful imagery.  All we really need to do is discover all that which God has already done. 

How freeing is that!  I don’t have to be witty or wise, I don’t have to be brilliant or cunning.  I just have to be faithful.  The pressure is off me to reinvent the wheel or deliver the perfect word or chart the perfect road map.  God does that—already did.  All I have to do is discover what He’s up to and get on board.    

If you’re concerned about what is next in your life, where to go, how to measure up at work, what the next big thing is you are to invent, deliver, or compose, things will be so much easier when you realize what a great director, worker, creator, writer, deliverer, composer you serve and how very good are His creations.  He’s prepared to reveal them to and through we His ambassadors and we can’t come up with any better than He already has.  Shift your concern from carrying the weight of creation and invention and perfection and move that gaze toward discovering what wonders He’s created, invented, and perfected for you and your life’s plan.

Discover.  Discover what’s been done.  Discover what plans have been laid.  Stop looking to create some mediocre version of what’s already been done to perfection.  Discover the good God has already composed and walk in it.

Paul gets rather hard in his old age.  His second letter to Timothy has the slightest cynical side to it–the warning of those with “itching ears” and naming the folks who had been tainting the Gospel in his day.  I find I too have that tendency at times; the awareness of how far we’ve strayed, of how much is left to do.

So today we get the harsher side of Word, the wake up warnings, the slap-you-across-the-face-in-hopes-you’re-righted-in-your-head-by-it words. 

People will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.     2 Timothy 3:2-4

Amazing how much like our world this list sounds. 

For those who live essentially moral and perhaps Christian lives, we see the chaos of our world and we think the problem here is this list.  Those who are epitomized by the character of this list are the ones bringing down the bar, the reason why we are in the messes we are in today.  That’s the problem, the ‘antagonist’ in our story is the perpetrator of the ills of Paul’s list. 

We’re right. 

But before we allow ourselves to cast the blame (again today as we did yesterday and the day before) we should probably finish reading his list.

having the appearance of godliness but denying its power.    2 Timothy 3:5

Now that doesn’t sound like the unbeliever, the ammoralist, the agnostic, the atheist, the you fill in the blank.  That sounds much more like … me.

Timothy Keller points out in Every Good Endeavor who the antagonist in our story really is:

“For in the Christian story, the antagonist is not non-Chistians but the reality of sin, which (as the gospel tells us) lies within us as well as within them.”

While I might have been inclined, like a Sunday sermon oft draws us to do, to listen to the listing of Paul with eyes toward someone else, he won’t let me pass without making sure I know he’s talking to me.

We have dropped prayer meetings from our churches.  Most believers have never participated in a communal prayer time.  Our Bibles look way too new and shiny as we sit on our cushioned spectator seats on Sunday mornings–if we even bring them out of the house anymore in the name of convenience, cellphones, and sermon outlines.  Our armor looks dated and rusted and generally unused if it ever makes an appearance at all. 

We have no idea of the power of the Gospel we profess to be relying on.  Few in the western hemisphere have personal accounts of shaking houses and miraculous fillings of empty oil jars, of dead being raised or even visions of the Savior.  We have little need for His intervention, thank you very much, and, therefore, have little knowledge of it.  We are “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.” (2 Timothy 3:7). 

Our God hasn’t changed.  He can still move mountains and walk on water and turn water to wine and raise the dead.  Perhaps the reason we don’t see Him doing it often is because, like His own hometown folks, we lack the faith needed to even ask. 

If we don’t like the state of our societies, if the world seems headed in the wrong direction and we’re looking for who’s at fault, the answer is me. My sin did this and does this again every day. And I think I need to read the whole list again and see just where I fall in many of the items that come before the telling final one.

The power to change the world is the power that raised the dead. And it’s still right there within all we who profess to cling to the Gospel and yet deny it’s power.

Ezekiel 33 begins with God making clear to Ezekiel the parameters of his job.  Ezekiel is required to deliver any word that the Lord gives him for the people.  Clear cut job description.  Just like any job, however, the stipulations of that work are also addressed:  you do it and you’re off the hook, you don’t do it and you suffer for the loss of all who didn’t hear the warning.

God shares with us that conversation with Ezekiel in detail.  He says that if he does what God tells him to and the people don’t listen and die, that’s their own fault, but Ezekiel is in the clear because he did what he was supposed to do.  If the warning isn’t delivered then the people, obviously, won’t heed it and will die and their deaths will be on Ezekiel’s hands – “his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand.”

There are two striking points here.  One, we are just called to do what God tells us to do.  How others respond or do/don’t do their part isn’t our business.  It’s classic Peter– don’t worry about John, you just do you. 

I once had a friend ask me about tithing.  He went to a church where the money might not have been handled well and my friend wasn’t tithing because he felt he would just watch that money “drive off in a Mercedes after the sermon.”  My first counsel was to go to a church whose administration he trusted, but beyond that I have only this to say:  When you arrive before the Master, He will not ask you what a priest did with your money.  He’ll ask what you did with your money. 

Ezekiel was just told to deliver the warning.  What followed wasn’t his burden to bear.

But then there’s a second point.  Ezekiel was a watchman.  He saw danger before others did.  He knew what was coming when others didn’t.  He had insider info.  He had an inside Source.

So do I.

And I know lots of people in danger.  Those people may or may not listen to words of warning, but that isn’t my issue, my burden to carry.  Relaying the warning is.

And if I fail to sound the alarm, their blood will be on my hands.  I will have to answer for that.  They will die in and for their own sins, but I will bear the guilt of having failed to lead them to change, of having withheld the warning. 

I don’t know how to be a watchman.  I do see a clear mandate that as God’s children, as those with privileged and life-giving information, those with an inside Source, I’m called to be one.

Stand on the wall, watch for both the danger on the horizon and those for whom that danger is coming, sound the trumpet, issue the alarm, give them the chance.  We are the watchmen.  

I’m an Agatha Christie fan.  I’m coming to the end of all of the Poirot books and recently read Cat Among the Pigeons.  I have no fears of spoiling it for you because if you haven’t read it in the 63 years since it was first published, you probably aren’t in danger of my ruining something you’re excited about anyway. 

So I read the final pages and am struck by a comment by a pivotal but altogether unknown character.  She references the Bible but really doesn’t finish her statement connecting it to her circumstances.  I’ve just been stuck on it for weeks.  Haunted somehow as if I’d missed not the climax of the story but something much, much bigger.

A long loved, but short enjoyed wife receives a packet of jewels from the agent of her deceased husband.  The man makes an offer to sell them for her that the money might be put in trust for she and her young son.  The man asks, “Would you like to keep just one?”  She looks at the shining stones and says no because she’d read in the Bible “about a woman whose price was above rubies.” 

She doesn’t elaborate and that is almost the final word of the whole book.  It seemed profound but until now I didn’t see it.

She is, of course, quoting Proverbs 31:10, “A wife of noble character who can find?  She is worth far more than rubies.”

Agatha Christie used a single word, the NIV uses a phrase, but the significance of either one illumines it all:  Above.  Far More. 

Christie’s woman realizes that her own worth is ABOVE the price of rubies.  Why then would she allow herself to be sold for less.  That’s a bad deal and shady business. 

We as Christ’s beloved are worth MORE THAN, FAR more than any possession and yet we sell our lives, our selves, our days for far less than even rubies.  We may or may not gain the world only to find it was a bad deal, shady business because we are, in fact, worth far more than that.

What does your day cost?  For what do you sell your time, your conscience, the essence of your life, and the cultivation of your character?  If it can be bought, sold, or stolen, you’re getting a bad deal and you are worth far more.