FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

Scripture References: Luke 2:1-20

He Came To Save Us – Continued

Back to God, the Father – Continued

When the Bible speaks of death, it means more than the heart ceasing to beat. It means total and absolute separation from God who is the source of life. Therefore, we can be dead while we still live. A man may get a clean bill of health and walk out of the doctor’s office a person without spiritual life. In a very real sense he is truly dead.

We are held in alien hands. Christ would wrench us free from those hands and give us back to the hands to whom we really belong. Augustine reminded us that God has made us for Himself and our souls are restless until they find their rest in Him.

Back to Himself

Christ desires to also win us to Himself. He intends for us to stack our arms of rebellion at His cross and ask for peace. And at His cross is precisely where peace is granted.

The freedom Christ gives us is not independent or self-dependent. It is freedom under the lordship of Christ. We are not free to do as we please but rather, as He pleases. The earliest Christian confession of faith was: Jesus Christ is Lord. The meaning of this is that Christ wins us back to Himself, establishing over us a new authority.

Sooner or later each of us has to make the confession that many members of Alcoholic Anonymous makes: I can’t manage my own life! Christ is more capable of managing my life than I am, and He is more worthy to possess it than I am.

Back to Each Other

Finally, Christ wins us back to each other; into a brotherhood and sisterhood that was always meant to be.

We so desperately need each other. Some of the most agonizing pain in all of life is to be separated from those who should/would be close to us, to be separated from those who should/would love us, and those whom we should/would love.

The tragedy of life can be expressed like this: We are like tiny islands in a strait separated from the two main-lands, God and our fellow human beings. Therefore, the reconciliation Jesus Christ gives is a double one. We are reconciled to God and to each other.

Where is it that Christ reconciles us to our fellows more than anywhere else? In the church. In that church universal, the Body of Christ. There we find brothers and sisters in Christ. It is there more than anywhere else that we are loved, accepted, and affirmed. It is there that we have our worth declared. It is there that people reach out and touch us, call us by name, strike cadence with us. It is there that our brothers and sisters, when we are descending into some long dark night of tragedy, walk with us, do not leave us, but stay with us until the night has passed and the morning is come.

Let us rejoice in the good news of Christmas and let us share it. Our planet has indeed been invaded. It may have happened centuries ago, but the invasion is still alive and well. Christ has come to free us and win us back to God, the Father, Himself, and those to whom we really belong.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, ESV © 2016 by Crossway Bibles.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture References: Luke 2:1-20

He Came To Free Us – Continued

The two ultimate tragedies of life are sin and death, and these are the two great forces that so tragically enslave us. Christ has come to set us free from both. Paul could, with confidence, say: “For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2). The Christmas angel said a Savior had been born who was Christ the Lord. He is the only one who can deal with our sins. He has gotten beneath the terrible load of our shame and has, on His cross, borne our guilt far removed from us. He can speak a free forgiveness to us.

He is the only man who can deal with our death. He has broken the power of death on Easter morning. He has left His tomb empty against a daybreak. He won the battle we would always lose, and He won, not only for Himself, but for all of us as well.

There’s a story of Murdo McDonald, one of the leading preachers of Scotland today. He was taken a prisoner of war by the Germans, and because the American prisoners of war didn’t have a chaplain, he stayed with them in their camp which was close by the English camp. Those in the English camp kept in touch with the outside world through an underground radio. A Scotsman, who spoke Gaelic, met daily with McDonald and across a barbed wire fence, told him about the news received from the BBC. McDonald relayed the news to the men in the American camp. Early one morning somebody awoke McDonald, shouting in his ear: “The Scotsman wants to see you, it’s terribly important!” McDonald put on his clothes as quickly as possible and ran to the barbed wire fence where the Scotsman spoke two words in Gaelic . . . “They’ve come!” It was D day. The word spread rapidly. The reaction was incredible. Men shouted for joy, hugged one another, leaped into the air, and rolled on the ground with abandon. Freedom and deliverance were on the way.

The message of Christmas is not that they’ve come, but that He’s come. And He has come to set us free.

In the first chapter of Revelation there is the most beautiful of all doxologies: “To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen” (Revelation 1:5-6).

This doxology tells us much about the worship of the early church. You can still feel its joyous and lilting quality. They worshiped as those who had been enslaved but were then free. “To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood.”

He Came To Save Us

Not only has Christ come to free us, He has also come to win us. He has come to win us back to God, the Father, to Himself, and to each other.

Back to God, the Father

God has made us, loves us, and cannot give us up. We belong to Him. Yet, we have rebelled against God and sought a counterfeit freedom. In rebelling against God, we have cut ourselves off from the spring of life.

To Be Continued

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, ESV © 2016 by Crossway Bibles.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture References: Luke 2:1-20

Love Came Down – Continued

Jesus came while the world slept. And the world awoke the next morning, wiped the drowsiness from its eyes, and went about its work, not knowing that our planet had been invaded.

It was a strange invasion. There were no ships, no troops, no instruments of war, no clashing of arms.

It didn’t look like an invasion, it all seemed so weak by comparison. There was a baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes, who may have whimpered during that first Christmas night. Watching lovingly over the baby was His mother, a very young Galilean peasant maiden, and standing beside the mother, with a careful eye on the child, was a brawny carpenter from Nazareth. They certainly didn’t conjure up the look of an invading army.

Yet, have we not learned that often things that look weak are strong while things that look strong are really weak? We tend to associate strength with big, bulky, noisy things. Therefore, real strength often eludes us. Let us not be deceived by the apparent weakness of the Christ child. He was and still is, strong.

There was a poem turned into a Christmas card with a reflection on the life of Jesus, titled “One Solitary Life.” The meditation ended like this:

“All the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever reigned have not affected the life of men on this earth as much as that one solitary life.”

When I was worship minister in Tucson, Arizona, back in the mid-eighties, we used to sing a song with the refrain that proclaimed: “Love came down at Christmas.” It was the right statement and sentiment at the right time. Love did come down at Christmas.

Love isn’t weak, love is strong. Maybe it is the only thing that is really strong. “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Love is the extension of God in our world.

Power that doesn’t feel sure of itself will always come with pomp and ceremony, will always parade and strut. But love, knowing itself to be strong, dares come in what appears to be weak, in a thing as frail and fragile as a baby.

Jesus Christ had invaded our world for two reasons. He had come to free us, and He had come to win us.

He Came To Free Us

Christ even now has come to free us because we as a people, mankind as a whole, is in bondage. We are bound by forces as real as chains about our ankles and cuffs about our wrists. There are walls as thick as prison walls, doors as heavy as prison doors, and bars as strong as prison bars that hold us in. Who doesn’t know what it is to be trapped, imprisoned, enslaved?

There is a strange irrationality about us. Given freedom we choose bondage, offered light we choose darkness, and with life before us we choose the way of death. Jesus said: “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19).

We rush into the arms of powers that do not love us, that do not care for us, which will enslave us, and some day destroy us if allowed too. Yet, we keep on leaping into those very arms.

Is there somebody who can snap those chains and break those cuffs? Is there somebody who can crash through those thick walls, carry away those heavy doors, and bear away those strong bars? Is there somebody who can rescue us from those strong arms that would crush us, who can wrench us from those alien hands that possess us, and give us back to the One to whom we belong? Yes, there is. Jesus Christ can. He said: “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).

To Be Continued

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, ESV © 2016 by Crossway Bibles.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture References: Luke 2:1-20

Within the last couple of decades, due to the advancement of space telescope technology, scientists believe they have discovered several planets that are beyond our solar system. That discovery, as it always does, has stimulated a question we have asked many times: Is there intelligent life out there in the universe, beyond our planet?

The late Carl Sagan, popular Cornell University astronomer, says that it is virtually a statistical certainty that intelligent life has evolved elsewhere over and over again and that many civilizations must be far older and more advanced than ours.

If there are intelligent beings out there, they must be curious about the possibility of us as we are about the possibility of them being out there. Do they try to send us signals and would they like to invade our planet? And if they did invade it, would they come as friends or foes? We wonder about that kind of thing and it is easy to develop a mentality that expects it. That mentality may become a panic button as it most certainly has in the past.

It was a bit before my time, but I can still remember the stories of Halloween 1938, when a twenty-three-year-old producer named Orson Welles turned our nation into panic with a radio play, “Invasion from Mars,” based on the H. G. Wells story, War of the Worlds. He simulated news broadcasts that interrupted the program, announcing the landing in New Jersey of Martians who were devastating the countryside with death rays. Many parts of the nation became truly hysterical. People rushed from their houses into the streets screaming, while many went to their churches to pray. Earth was being invaded.

The mentality that halfway believes in an invasion from outer space explains why so many people have seriously pursued the myth of flying saucers and of “little gray men.” But long before we knew about rockets, satellites, and spaceships, the church has known that our planet had been invaded.

It happened at a time long ago that we now celebrate as Christmas. Christmas is of earth. It tells about shepherds, a manger, and swaddling clothes, and wise men seeking after a birth of two years previous. Yet, it is of heaven, too. There is something extraterrestrial about Christmas. There is a bright light from heaven, a heavenly chorus that sings, and an angel that announces: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). Christ with great love and grace, like a benevolent invader, has come to our earth at Christmastime.

Love Came Down

Like most invasions, it came at night.

During World War II and in the wars and skirmishes since, many surprise attacks were accomplished by an amphibious infantry division. They were trained to establish beachheads, and they made their landings mainly at night. They moved under the cover of darkness in order to take the enemy by surprise. And, of course, the natives were surprised. We had come while they slept.

Luke tells us that “And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8). And we sing the words, “While shepherds watched their flocks by night.”

To Be Continued

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, ESV © 2016 by Crossway Bibles.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.