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The Timing Of Christmas

The Coming Of Christ Happened At Just The Right Time

I am really good at imagining a lot of “what if” style scenarios. I must have an overactive imagination, I’m not sure. I can come up with a variety of scenarios that spark my thinking. What would it have been like if it had happened this way? Christmas is a prime example of this.

The Timing Of Christmas

This displays itself mostly in those moments after a verbal exchange with someone. I can be thinking about it later and that’s when the perfect rejoinder appears in my mind. Mostly, it’s far too late to do anything about it, but my mind works along those channels sometimes.

I do this with biblical stuff too. I ask questions like, “Why did God do it that way? What if he had done it like this instead?” And most of the time, in situations like these, I end up at the somewhat unsatisfying conclusion of, “Well, that was just God’s timing.” Or, “That was God’s design.”

I don’t like that conclusion. It seems to be a cop out. But there are many times when that seems to be the only answer I’m going to get.

Take the birth of Christ, for example. Why did God choose to send his Son as a baby at the specific time that he did? I can think of several eras that I might have chosen instead. And so my mind wanders of into the land of “what if…” What if Christmas was different?

We wish you the happiest of Thanksgivings this year! Even with all the craziness we have experienced in 2020, please make sure you take the time to be thankful for the good things that God has blessed you with! Happy Thanksgiving!

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Jesus On Relationships in Matthew 5

A Look At Matthew 5:27-32

The next two topics addressed in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew both are centered on relationships. One is internal, and the other is more external.

Jesus On Relationships in Matthew 5

Many of the topics that Jesus address in this passage are topics that are covered in the Old Testament Scriptures. The Jewish people would have known these laws and rules quite well, and the Pharisees were known for keeping the Law to the letter as perfectly as they could. However, Jesus turns all of that upside down and makes the keeping of rules a matter of the heart.

He did that clearly with the topic of murder and anger. Now he turns to a couple of more intimate relational topics: adultery and divorce.

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Jesus On Anger in Matthew 5

A Look At Matthew 5:21-26

After the Beatitudes at the beginning of Matthew 5, the rest of the chapter is filled with short snippets of texts that are very familiar to our ears. The first one that Jesus addresses is the topic of anger.

Anger: Matthew 5:21-26

“You have heard it said…” That’s how Jesus introduces many of these topics. And for most of his hearers, they had heard it said. They would have been very familiar with the Mosaic Law, and for those who were part of the Council, the Sanhedrin, they would have been intimately familiar with it. They knew it frontwards and backwards. But they were missing the point.

Moses had given them this Law, and had done so while the nation of Israel was encamped around Mount Sinai, after the exodus from Egypt. But even though it came through Moses, he wasn’t the author… God was.

Jesus is about to turn their understanding of both the Law and its Author completely upside down.

He takes a phrase that they would have known well, “You shall not commit murder” (Exodus 20:13; Matthew 5:21), and completely reinterprets it. Murder was wrong, God had told them so when the Law was given.

But Jesus then states, “But I say to you…” He gives a new understanding of the Law. And he does it with the forceful authority of the Lawgiver, God himself. His hearers, especially those in the religious council, would have heard both messages quite clearly: Jesus was giving them a new understanding of the passage, and he was claiming to be God in the process.

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Hanging Out With God

Habits To Keep You Rooted

Habits. We all have them. Good and bad. Many of the bad habits we work hard to break, or at least reduce their influence in our lives. And we often set goals to build better habits into our lives in place of them. They are a key part of our lives, either way. And one of the most foundational spiritual habits that we can develop is hanging out with God.

Habits: Hanging Out With God

Do you have what many people call a “quiet time” with God? I have never really liked that term. I always seem to associate “quiet time” with my mom wanting me to calm down so she could have some quiet. So she would send me off to be quiet for a while with a book or something.

Later, as I grew in my faith, I kept hearing people talk about “quiet times.” Frankly, that never appealed to me because of that association I had in my mind. When I later learned to call it something else, a whole new aspect of my relationship with God was opened up to me. I started to call it, “hanging out with God.”

After all, that’s what I do with my friends. That’s what I do with people from our church. That’s a big part of my life, really. I hang out with others. And because of that, those relationships are deepened and richer as a result. So why wouldn’t that work in my relationship with God?

It does.