Flecks of snow danced on the early morning sky, soon giving way to brief showers of the white stuff. The crystalline ballet was gloriously unusual for Atlanta and even more so in early February. My wife and I sat quietly in our van, parked in a hospital parking garage. I was due inside at five a.m. but couldn’t make myself shut off the engine. The very act of moving toward the door was in itself an act of betrayal to myself.
So I stole some moments, delaying the inevitable, watching the playful antics of the tiny white visitors through a defrosted window. Sandy sat very still beside me, and I know she was silently bracing herself for the long weeks ahead in which she would have to do the juggling act of all time: pulling double duty of an already excessively demanding lifestyle. I, on the other hand, was facing bed duty. For twelve weeks. Bless my heart, I wasn’t thinking of the circus act Sandy would be forced to pull off. I was sinking ever deeper, wrapped in my own trial of dual surgeries, requiring a potentially three-month stay in the hospital I was now looking at.
Sandy touched my hand reassuringly but said not a word. That tender act was all it took to release a welling of tears to my eyes. A single tear escaped from the forming pool and traced a line down my cheek. In my heart I was crying, “Lord, is there no other way?” The leaden sky was silent. No. This was my journey—and my wife’s—and since there was no way around it, I collected myself, sighed deeply and shut off the engine. It was time. Together we headed toward the garage elevator that would take me to my home away from home and church for the next dozen weeks. Continue reading Seven Ways To Praise Him
Hold fast Help is on the way Hold fast He’s come to save the day What I’ve learned in my life One thing stronger than my strife Is His grasp So hold fast –Mercy Me, Hold Fast
Someone I know is falling apart at the seams. I have been watching them make all the wrong choices for some time and now I see them paying all the retail prices on their purchases. On a recent day my heart hurt watching them get pummeled by life. In a ten hour span of time, this poor soul could barely come through one crisis without getting sideswiped by another and their already “very bad day” culminated with the most dreaded phone call they had ever had to answer. I wince for them even now as I recall watching the emotional bloodbath they were dragged through. It was pathetically painful to watch. R-rated, even.
I desperately want to reach in and rescue them but that is a pipe dream. Could they have come through the worst of it? Possibly. Maybe. Ummmm, no. Not by a long shot. There is still a Valdez-sized clean-up ahead. A gargantuan slick on the ocean. And pieces and shards of life scattered everywhere, much like flotsam after a wreckage at sea.
(God, show them a hope. Gather up the pieces of the mess they have made and put them together again. God, get the glory. Take them to the place of Grace where peace rules and heaven is graspable.)
I wish they could have been with me tonight as I prayed with a man whose body is covered–every inch of it–with an auto-immune disease only one in a half million suffer with. There is no treatment. No cure. It must run its course, sometimes taking as long as four years. It is painful. It burns. It is horrific. I went to pray for this giant of a man of God but, marvel of marvels, he prayed for me! Tears ran down his face and swollen arms were lifted to the heavens as he thanked God for his valley! “I know Your purpose in this,” he cried out to the Lord in triumph. “You reign in me! I am Yours!” he shouted to the ceiling tiles. The man laughed in joyful surrender. Laughed!
He is a man who is walking in peace.
I wish my loved one could stand in the same faith of a woman I know who is in the hospital tonight. She and her husband were recently faced with the most difficult decision of their lives: should he stay home and be by her bedside or return to the mission field? What would you do? As in everything in their lives, they took it to the Lord. With reckless abandon, her husband is en route to their field in a hostile country where countless millions need Jesus. Did they choose ministry over marriage? Heavens no! They chose God over ALL things…
I have no doubt that her hospital room is a sanctuary of heavenly peace tonight. I just betcha that that plane ride her husband is taking, though filled with second-guessing and painful separation, is met with a grace worth the risk.
I wish, oh how I wish, this soul could have listened in on a phone conversation I had with a lady just yesterday. It was her sad misfortune to send her son away to a home for troubled sons for a full year. Next month she and her husband will be able to visit him for the first time in six months. She told me that it has only been recently that she can say his name in her home without breaking down. Now she is carried by a grace that sweeps her to peace-filled places and she smiles knowing God is shaping her son and he is finding out for the first time who he is in Christ. His letters home are a diary of the power of God to transform. Predictably, even in the Body of Christ, some have questioned her move, even gone so far as to be angry and think she has thrown the poor child away. She listened for awhile and even agreed somewhat. Until, that is, the glassy calm seas of peace surrounded her and told her to have faith. He is the One who rules the storm. You haven’t thrown him away, My Child. You have given him to Me.
There is no safer Place.
Speaking of “Place,” David gave the secret of his oft-tormented existence. In the Hebrew Hymn Book, chapter 31 and verse 12, he says of himself that he is a “broken” man. The word he uses is also used of Adam in the book of Genesis when he is told to “tend” the garden. It means to break up the soil for planting. God’s minstrel is saying that the hoes and rakes and plows of life had ripped him to clods and bits and uncovered his earthiness.
What a sad predicament, and one to which we can all relate.
But (oh, don’t you just love the Biblical “buts”?), two verses later he lets us in on a little secret. He says that when he is in such a bind, he “trusts” in God. The word translated “trust” is an active verb and it pictures a place where David runs to when he is broken to bits, scattered hither and yon, like jetsam from a dashed sea vessel. He finds a tide that will carry him to a Harbor of Refuge where he can safely winter out the storm. Or in the field of battle when the bombs are bursting in air, he is stolen away into a citadel of protection. He tells us God is a Person who shows him a Place everytime and in any situation.
The couch where my friend suffers from the horrific skin disease has become David’s threshingfloor where God shows mercy and healing (2 Samuel 24:18). The porch where my sister in Christ waits for her son’s return is her Baal-perazim (1 Chronicles 14:11) where God “breaks through” against the enemy. And that courageous wife in the hospital tonight? She’s really in Ziklag where David “encouraged himself (literally, ‘latched onto’) in the Lord” (1 Samuel 30:6) despite great loss and popular opinion.
Take a page from David’s hymnbook. Run, don’t walk, to the Place God has prepared for you in your calamity. He is there. He is able. He will come through for you.
Sad to say, my friend right now is not ready to take the way of restoration. “I’ve gotten this far without God,” they glibly stated. “I can get myself out of this too.” That’s just their pain talking. I know them well and I know that in time they too will run to Jesus. And when they do, I can predict the outcome: He will gather them up, love on them, put them aright and set them free.
“The great difference between present-day Christianity and that of which we read in these letters (The New Testament epistles) is that to us it is primarily a performance; to them it was a real experience. We are apt to reduce the Christian religion to a code, or at best a rule of heart and life. To these men it is quite plainly the invasion of their lives by a new quality of life altogether. They do not hesitate describing this as Christ “living in” them. These early Christians were on fire with the conviction that they had become, through Christ, literal sons of God; they were pioneers of a new humanity, founders of a new Kingdom. They still speak to us across the centuries. Perhaps if we believed what they believed, we might achieve what they achieved.” J.B. Phillips Letters To Young Churches
“Do not forget the meaning of the Incarnation. It was the invasion of human history by One who snatched the scepter from the usurper. It was the intrusion of forces into human history which dissolved the consistency of the works of the devil and caused them to break and fail. Incarnation was the coming of the Stronger than the strong man armed to destroy the works of the devil…” G. Campbell Morgan
“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed…” (Jesus, 1st Century)
“The Kingdom is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened…” (Ibid.)
In the fourteenth century King Edward III of England encroached upon France and took the throne he claimed he had a right to, and took back the territory lost to his realm. The year was 1337 and thus began the “100 Year War”…
If the incarnation tells us anything, it says that we have and serve a Universal King, the rightful King, who has come to earth to destroy the works and dominion of the devil and to place His rule in the hearts of all who will submit to His reign. His coming and subsequent victory at the Cross and Tomb put an end in the heavenlies to the four thousand year war that had been waged in the Garden of Genesis.
But we’ve emasculated the Christmas Story! We’ve come to think of it solely in terms of cattle gently lowing, donkeys braying contentedly, sheep dozing peacefully beside a halo-shrouded crib, shepherds hushed and admiring, a sleepy little village, twinkling lights, sugarplums and gingerbread houses—a veritable homespun, down-home, Smoky Mountain snow globe scene!
Don’t think me heartless. I love the Frank Capra, Walton Mountain, Bing Crosby and Frosty side of Christmas as much as the next guy and possibly more, but that stuff is best kept separated from what Advent represents. Let’s not hear the Christmas Story and think of it in trite sayings like “God come to earth” or a Child born in Bethlehem or a Baby lying in a manger, as if that were all there was to it.
Think of it as an invasion.
An INCARNATION, yes, but also an INVASION most certainly! Heaven’s Darling has come to an earth that lies in the power of the evil one and has been accompanied by a host of the angelic army; He has come behind enemy lines to take His rightful place in hearts and to free those enslaved in darkness.
Can you imagine the devilish glee at the incarnation? Can you just hear the deep-throated mirth of the wicked one as he looks upon an outcast Baby born to humble parentage, laid in straw and draped in rags, as he says with side-splitting laughter toward the heavens, “Is that the best You can do?” He must have thought smugly to himself, “This is going to be even easier than I thought!”
But the scene in that feeding-trough is not one of dismay, embarrasment or backing down to the challenge. The scene in Bethlehem may as well have been a meeting of the Top Brass, the Joint Chiefs, in the Situation Room plotting strategy for the sure destruction of the enemy once and for all. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are all present with the mighty hosts of Heaven—an angelic army of superheroes mustering overhead—but the latter are only for show. In fact, they come to sing, not make war! The devil will be felled by a Baby!
As the camera pans on the Divine Visitation we find a curious development. Amid the circle of the Godhead are a handful of humble patrons. They are each witnesses of the Glory because the Lord has found an “amen” in their hearts. People like Joseph. And Mary. The unlikely shepherd-evangelists. These are the special forces God has inserted into enemy territory, and any day now, the supply caravan will be arriving with more than enough to commence the aggression.
“Sweet Little Jesus Boy”??? Hardly. That sentiment does no justice to the Advent of the Christ-King. To the enemy there was nothing sweet about it. It was nothing short of the Godhead taking off their gloves and slapping the devil on his cheek, challenging him to a duel to the death!
1 John 3:8 says—
“The Son of God appeared for this purpose: to destroy the works of the devil.”
John Piper spoke to this truth:
“The only people who understand Christmas and embrace Christmas for what it is are people who feel sick and who desperately want their sickness destroyed. Unless you welcome Jesus as a Destroyer in your life, you can’t have Him as a Savior. Christmas is God’s invasion of enemy territory to rescue a people from the devil and destroy the sin in their lives.”
We cannot have Him as Savior all the while rejecting Him as Lord and Conqueror. The angels’ announcement to those gritty shepherds abiding in the fields watching over the flocks earmarked for Passover sacrifice was one of a King’s Visitation. A King unlike any other:
“This day, in the City of David, a Savior has been born for you who is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:11)
That’s the only time in the New Testament this title is used exactly this way. For Jews, to pronounce The Name (“YHWH”) was against their Law, so when public reading of the Jewish Scriptures took place, whenever the speaker came to the sacred name of God, he would substitute another word, Adonai, and continue on. The word found here in the Greek is ‘kurios’ which is the same as the Hebrew ‘adonai’. Do you see what the angels were declaring? They were giving this Baby the title, “Messiah-Yaweh”! This was not just an important person or another King, but the King of all kings and Lord of all lords.
When Christ came to earth, He brought His Kingdom with Him, then made Himself the Ransom by which to purchase it. He is the nobleman of Luke 19:12 who goes off to a far country to procure a Kingdom for Himself and tells His servants to “occupy ’til I come.”
After an invasion comes an occupation! When the shepherds were given the “rhema” of the Incarnation (translated “thing” in Luke 2:15), they went everywhere telling the news, spreading the occupation. After the Magi saw Him, they returned to Arabia and Persia, extending the occupation. Mary and Joseph brought God’s Treasure to Jerusalem eight days later to be presented in the Temple as their Firstborn and touched off the beginnings of a Divine occupation in the capital city.
Fast forward just a bit and follow the Advent family as they travel to Egypt flexing the borders of Christ’s realm even further. When they returned to their homeland, ‘rhema’ put them in Nazareth, so the ripples of His reign continued to expand. Thereafter, the chosen couple took the Christ Child to Jerusalem every year for the High Feast Day which gives the vivid illustration of the penetration of the Kingdom, much like the ramming of a door until it falls off its hinges.
A chapter later (Luke 3), Yeshua’s cousin John is seen in this otherworldly occupation as he preaches out in the wilderness to crowds of settlers, soldiers and tax collectors, setting forth the terms of occupation: repentance and faith. Thus the realm is spreading everywhere, in every hamlet, the subject of every dinner conversation, in the palace of Herod, the Roman armories and among the teeming throngs in the commercial districts…
ALL THIS WAS DONE BEHIND ENEMY LINES. Right under the devil’s nose. In his own backyard. And there was nothing he could do to stop it! At Golgotha, the Man Jesus walked right into the devil’s living room, through the front door (the gates of hell), overpowered the strongman, and took his booty—those bound in darkness—and led them out of their imprisonment (see Matthew 12:29-ff).
Luke’s narrative of Advent begins with the most powerful man on earth–Caesar–and ends with a humble couple spending the night in a barn, not to mention vile, ignorant, earthy shepherds looking on in wonderment as witnesses of the Divine Visitation. Men whose character was so suspect they would not have been allowed to testify in court, yet God chose them as His witnesses!
What are the odds this thing could ever by pulled off? I’d say pretty good, considering it was a Baby who was the enemy’s undoing! A baby, by the way, who launched His invasion by toddling right into the enemy’s camp.
“Glory to God in the highest! And on earth, peace among (Greek, “in”) men with whom God is pleased.” (Luke 2:14)
