Category Archives: Faith and Practice

How To Celebrate Christmas – Part 1

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I’ve been reading James Montgomery Boice’s book, “The Christ of Christmas.”  The closing chapter is entitled “How to Celebrate Christmas,” and in the next couple of blogs, I thought I’d share an excerpt from the chapter on 4 ways to celebrate Christmas.  Enjoy!

One way you and I can celebrate Christmas is to be amazed at it.  That is suggested in Luke 2:18 – “And all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.”

There are two kinds of amazement, of course, and to be perfectly fair we must admit that at the beginning.  One kind of amazement is merely a tickling of the fancy.  It is what we call a seven-day wonder; that is, a temporary fascination with something unusual  After such a wonder ha run its course nobody gives the cause of it a second thought, and rightly so.  The other kind of amazement is quite different.  It is a holy amazement, which is a proper wonder at those acts of God that are beyond human comprehension.  It borders on adoration if, indeed, it is not identical to it.  In cone sense all the acts of God are legitimate grounds of such amazement. If we turn back to the earliest chapters of Genesis, we discover a description of the globe before God fashioned it into the kind of world we know and are told that in that period the Spirit of God has hovering over the waters.  What a cause for wonder that is!  Then out of the darkness God spoke to call forth life and order.  We turn from that picture to the final pages of the Bible, and in those pages we find the Lord Jesus Christ high and lifted up and all created orders praying homage to Him.  That is a cause for wonder.  From beginning to end God’s dealings with our race are a cause for amazement.  But of all those dealings, that which should evoke our greatest amazement is the incarnation of the Son of God, which we mark especially at Christmas.  God become man!  The deity in human flesh!  How can that be?  We cannot understand it; but it is true nevertheless, and we marvel at it.  Or at least we should marvel at it.

Do you want to celebrate Christmas?  Then be amazed at it.  Allow it to stretch your mind.

I believe that is why the wonder of children seems so appropriate at Christmas-time.  It is not that their wonder is all a Christian wonder, of course.  They are not all thinking of God or Jesus as they stand spellbound at the presents and tree on Christmas morning.  Or at least that is not the whole of their wonder.  But their wonder is not inappropriate, for at the very least it is an analogy of what our wonder should be if we are those who (at least in part) understand the Christmas story.

So let the learning be two ways.  Children must learn who Jesus is and what Christmas is all about from us.  They must learn to love Him and serve Him more and more acceptably.  But let us also learn from them and so recapture our own sense of amazement at the incarnation. 

SDG

The Second Coming

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I’ve been doing a bit of reading this Advent Season, trying to preach advent messages from a fresh perspective.  I came upon this from C.S. Lewis I thought I’d share.

In King Lear (III:VII) there is a man who is such a minor character that Shakespeare has not given him even a name; he is merely “First Servant.”  All the characters around him – Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund – have fine long-term plans.  They think they know how the story is going to end, and they are quite wrong.  The servant has no such delusions.  He has no notion of how the play is going to go.  but he understands the present scene.  He sees an abomination (the blinding of Gloucester) taking place.  He will not stand it.  His sword is out and pointed at his master’s breast in a moment: then Regan stabs him dead from behind.  That is his whole part: eight lines all told.  But if it were real life and not a play, that is the part it would be best to have acted.

The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end.  the curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.  This seems to some people intolerably frustrating.  So many things would be interrupted.  Perhaps you were going to get married next month, perhaps you were going to get a raise next week: you may be on the verge of a great scientific discovery; you may be maturing great social and political reforms.  Surely no good and wise God would be so very unreasonable as to cut all this short?  Not now, of all moments.

But we think thus because we keep on assuming that we know the play.  We do not know the play.  We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V.  We do not know who are the major and the minor characters.  The Author knows.  The audience, if there is an audience (if angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven fill the pit and the stalls), may have an inkling.  But we, never seeing the play from outside, never meeting any characters except the tiny minority who are “on” in the same scenes as ourselves, wholly ignorant of the future and very imperfectly informed about the past, cannot tell at what moment the end ought to come.  That it will come when it ought, we may be sure; but we waste our time in guessing when that will be.  That it has a meaning we may be sure, but we cannot see it.  When it is over, we may be told.  We are led to expect that the Author will have something to say to each of us on the part that each of us has played.  The playing it well is what matters infinitely.

Thank you Mr. Lewis!  Let us watch and be ready.