Thoughts on Christmas

So I thought I would share a little reflection on the Christmas season now that it has passed.  Every year I get struck by Christmas hymns.  I love them.  I love the theology behind them, I love the joy that they bring.  And every year it seems that a different hymn really sticks out in my mind.  This year, that hymn was "O Come O Come Emmanuel," especially the first verse.  The first verse goes like this:

O come, O come, Emmanuel

And ransom captive Israel

That mourns in lonely exile here

Until the Son of God appear

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel

Shall come to they, O Israel.

This chorus is just packed with things that just exploded all over the inside of my brain this year.  You can feel the anguish of the first three lines and the joy of the last three.  The author is pleading for Emmanuel, which means God with us, to come.  But just appearing is not enough.  There is a keen awareness of the captive state of the souls of men and this is what I spent a lot of time contemplating of late.

How do you convey the idea of captivity to a people who has never known anything except freedom.  Freedom to do whatever they please.  Want to drive from coast to coast, no problem.  Want to start a business, go for it.  Want to buy something, if you have the money, no one is stopping you.  And that freedom has blinded us to the fact that we are not basically good people.  We are not morally upright.  We are rebels.  We are captives, and more often than not willing captives, to sin and evil.

This is why the saints of old groaned for the coming of the Messiah. This is why Simeon waited in the temple to see the consolation of Israel, the Lord's salvation.  This is why David, Isaiah, and the prophets yearned for more because they knew the Lord was sending his Holy Servant to make atonement, to set things right.  This is the implication of Christmas.  That God became flesh because we could not free ourselves.

what we dedicate our lives to

So today I was reading the Wall Street Journal and they had an almost full page piece on a man named Park Tae-joon.  I had never heard of this man, I bet none of you have either.  Mr. Park, 1927-2011, was a former South Korean army officer who literally built the South Korean steel industry from nothing after the Korean war.  In his final years he led a charitable organization near Seoul and told reporters he lived by a simple motto: "I dedicate my short life to my eternal country."

My first thought was, "How sad."  Here is a guy who thought a country was eternal and that was as high a thing he could devote his life too.  I thought, "Man, this guy died and the minute after his heart stopped beating he realized he wasted his life because his country isn't eternal."  But then I realized that Mr. Park's statement spoke volumes more about our lives than his.  I am at a coach's convention which, professionally, has been invaluable.  But as I look around the room, it is filled with people who will say, "I dedicate my short life to my eternal sport."  Sure, we can dress it up and say we are positively influencing lives (which is true in most cases) or that we are attempting to make life better for some kids (again true in most cases), but at the end of they day, it is still a game.  More than that, at least Mr. Park had the insight to realize that life is short.  Even if I live to be 80 years old, life is incredibly short.  Most of us, by that I mean most Americans, just don't get that.  We think we will live forever, at least we live our lives like we will live forever. 

So what is it that we would say we dedicate our short lives too?  Better yet, what would the way we live say we dedicate our short lives too?

the purpose of pain (and other garbage in life)

What is the purpose of pain and suffering?  Why is that throughout history God's primary means of sanctification is causing his church to go through various trials and tribulations and even crazier commanding those who follow him to rejoice that they are going through them (James 1:2; 1 Pet 1:6-7)? Quite simply there is nothing like trials and tribulations to loosen our grip on this world and cause us to desire Christ more than life itself.  It is easy, especially in America, to say that we love Christ and depend on Him for everything and yet at the same time of an insatiable love for the world.  This form of "Christianity" is found nowhere in scripture or history.  God in his mercy and love allows us to suffer in this world so that we do not cling tightly to it.  For there is nothing in this world that can satisfy that longing in our souls for peace than Jesus Christ.  

We all know it.  Every man and woman born on this earth knows deep down there is something broken.  We turn on the news and see it.  We see the headlines of war, rape, and exploitation and our soul cries out there is something wrong and we long for peace in our hearts.  Yet most men don't think they are part of the problem.  The problem lies outside of themselves.  So men turn to things outside of themselves to try to remedy the problem, and the world is ready and waiting with a whole host of things to try to fill the longing for peace with.  Money, sex, power, humanitarian assistance, philanthropy, you name it, men spend their lives seeking peace for their souls, never stopping to think that the reason they don't have peace is because they are at war with a holy, perfect God.  And yet God, in his infinite mercy and grace, reaches into creation and saves men.  He gives them new hearts, changing their desires from the things of this world to Himself.  Giving them hearts that long for him above everything else.  And then he makes their lives hard and often times down right miserable so that they will never again long for the things of this earth and rather yearn for the day when sin will be no more and they look on the face of Jesus Christ forever more.  And through the trials and pain, there is an unmistakeable, and unexplainable, joy.  Rooted deep in the nature and character of God.  And through this process they are changed more and more into the likeness of Christ.  It is not to say they never sin again, but the temptations of this earth, the desires of the flesh (materialism, sex, power, you name it) hold less and less appeal to them as they see the manifold beauty and perfection of Jesus Christ.

Is your heart's cry to see Jesus Christ because of who he is?  Does our heart cry out with our Christian brothers and sisters throughout history in a love for God for who he is in himself and not for what he does for us?  Do we rejoice in hardship because it loosens our grip on this world and fixes our eyes on Christ?