Archive - Life
RSS Feed
War on Christmas
I have mixed feelings about the whole “War on Christmas” battle that gets waged every year around this time.
I noticed this week at work that someone put out a bunch of “Merry Christmas” cards on an entryway table. A few hours later I came by and noticed that someone had thrown them all out.
The next day, someone put out a bunch of “Happy Kwanzaa” cards on the exact same table. Guess what? Nobody threw them out.
Isn’t that odd?
Anyway, it is easy this time of year to get all worked up about such things. Which is why I so appreciated a post over at GraceGround today called “War. On Christmas” by Kimberly Parker. Here is an excerpt:
For the past 50+ years in North America, Christians have been distracted by a global “war on Christmas” not even recognizing that it is creating war in their hearts. Don’t use the perceived war on Christmas as an opportunity to take your focus off of Christ. Don’t use it as an excuse for bad behavior. Don’t spread gossip, propaganda or untruths about anyone because of what you think they believe or don’t believe. Let it stop with you.
Head on over there to read the rest of this post, and this Christmas season, let the peace of Christ dwell in you richly.
The Christmas Song of Mary
Though the Magnificat is sometimes referred to as a Christmas song of Mary, she didn’t actually sing it after Jesus was born, but about nine months before His birth (see Luke 1:39-56).
Regardless, the significance of the song is not when she sang it, but what it is she sang. Here is an except from a sermon I preached on the Magnificat many years ago:
Mary’s song is a beautiful reminder of all that God has done for us and has promised to do for those who follow after Him. It is a new song that burst from the lips of Mary based on what she knew Scripture to say.
This song, for me, seems to end abruptly. All of a sudden, it’s just over. It stops. Maybe Mary drifted off into humming her tune. Maybe Luke didn’t record all of her song. But I think her song ended just as recorded here—with an abrupt stop.
Why? Because her song is not over. This was just the first verse of millions more to come. She sang many more stanzas throughout her life, and the men and women of God throughout time who allow the words of Scripture to penetrate their minds have added many more words to this song.
You can add your own verse too. Your life is a stanza in the greatest song ever written. You are part of a divine symphony. How are you playing your piece?
It’s like the end of the book of Acts. Acts 28 ends without any conclusion. It seems that there should be an Acts 29. And there is. There is no end to Acts, because you and I are continuing to write chapters in that book which records the acts of the Christians in the church. You and I are Acts 29, and 30, and 31 and on and on. It’s similar with Mary’s song. You and I are writing more stanzas.
“It must never be forgotten that whenever Christ has entered into the human heart, a new song has been put into the mouth of the believer. Christianity in the heart means music in the life. A religion without joy is a landscape without the sun. Christianity without the elevation of music is as an eagle with broken wings.”
Faith Alone is Useless
James 2:14-21 has caused lots of problems in the church over the centuries. With our preoccupation with how to get to heaven when we die, we think that when James says, “Faith alone cannot save him, can it?” James is talking about eternal life and how to get to heaven when we die.
Nothing could be further from the truth!
The Book of James
The letter of James is one of the most practical books in the entire New Testament. It is not an evangelistic tract telling people how to get to heaven when they die. Instead, it is a book about how to love and serve one another in the church. It is practical book about money, favoritism, gossip, and meeting each other’s needs. Nowhere in the entire book is James concerned about trying to determine who has eternal life and who does not. This includes James 2.
James 2:14-21
When we read James 2 with this in mind, we see immediately what James is concerned about. There are brothers and sisters in the church who have need of food and daily clothes. There are others within the church who could meet those needs by providing food and clothes, but instead, they tell these needy brethren, “I have faith that God will provide for you.” In modern church lingo, we say, “I’ll pray for you.”
Answer Your Own Prayer
In a previous post, we have seen that work and prayer are both ways of accomplishing God’s will in the world.
This close connection between work and prayer as means of accomplishing God’s will in the world helps give us direction for how to see answers to our prayers, and how to go about accomplishing God’s will in this world.
Sometimes I think we confuse work and prayer, and we pray when we should be working, and we work when we should be praying. There have been times in Christian history when the church has focused more on work than prayer, but I think that for the past fifty years or so, the church has focused more on prayer than work.
And this brings us back to the subject of prayer meetings. It is far more popular in many churches to get together and pray about a need in the community than it is to get together and actually do something about a need in the community. Though prayer is a form of work, we must not think that prayer is a substitute for work.
Yet this is often what gets implicitly taught in many of our church prayer meetings.
Continue Reading…
Sam (4)
Kirk (2)
Ant Writes (1)
Cameron (1)
Carlos (1)
cfnnry (1)
Dan B. (1)
David (1)
Derrick (1)
Dillon (1)
Katherine Gunn (105)
bullet (87)
Kirk (76)
FedExMOP (73)
Swanny (70)
Clive Clifton (67)
B Crump (60)
Tim Nichols (56)
