WAS 2016 the Worst? (Friday Devotional)

‘Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”’

- Matthew 2:13-15

There’s a meme that’s been going around social media the last few days after the deaths of actress Carrie Fisher and, one day later, her mother Debbie Reynolds: 2016 cannot end soon enough. Listing famous names like Alan Rickman, Merle Haggard, David Bowie, and Prince, the meme facetiously lays the blame for their deaths at the feet of an unlikely culprit, the year itself. If we can just flip the calendar to 2017, people seem to say, things will get better. The implication is clear from lovers of pop culture—we’ve never had a year this bad.

It’s a pessimistic attitude, but one that can quickly manage to seep into other aspects of your life, from your health to your politics to your favorite sports team. If 2016 didn’t go your way, the temptation is to go to the extreme and say that not only are things bad now, they’re worse than they’ve ever been. Even in the church, where hope is fundamental to our identity, many fall prey to this sort of fatalism, looking to persecution abroad and divisions at home and ultimately reaching the same conclusion much of the world has: it’s never been this bad.

When such thoughts threaten your hope in Christ, it helps to remember events that stretch back long before 2016. While on Christmas morning we all celebrate the joy of Christ’s birth 2,000 years ago, we often skip past what happened next—while still a small child, Jesus was already under threat from earthly powers. Warned by an angel about King Herod’s jealous, murderous pursuit of the infant Messiah, Jesus’s family became refugees in Egypt, forced to hide there until Herod’s death. Jesus could not even walk yet and he was already in danger.

When we assume the church is in worse shape than it’s ever known before, we fail to remember where our faith—and indeed, our Lord himself—has been. From cradle to cross, Jesus was constantly under siege by those who did not value, understand, or appreciate his gospel. From the earliest days of the church, persecution and even martyrdom were constant reminders that this world is our mission field, but it is not our home. Threats and suffering have trailed the name of Jesus since his birth.

Nevertheless, Jesus Christ and his church are still here. Far from eliminating Christianity, even the harshest persecutions have only helped it grow. When the world and the church have stood in stark contrast to one another, God has been faithful to ensure that the gospel continues to be shared, heard, and received. So if you look at 2016 with distress, sure it can never get any worse for God’s people, may you find hope both in God’s past steadfastness and His promised victory. If God could call His infant Son out of Egypt, He is more than able to call His church today.

God's Counting on You (Friday Devotional)

“Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.””

- Matthew 1:18-23

It’s after midnight as I write this, and there is one reason why I’m not in bed: my one-week-old son won’t fall asleep. He’s not crying or even whimpering, but boy is he squirming, and I’m left to decipher what he’s trying to tell me as he flails those little arms and legs. At this stage of his life the list of possibilities is short: chances are he wants food, a clean diaper, some help being burped, or maybe just to be held by his mommy or daddy. And whatever he wants, he’s counting on me or his mother to do it for him.

The more I learn about my own child, the more I think about the one whom Christmas celebrates. After all, this is the season every year when we rejoice at the coming of Jesus Christ into the world, not as a conquering king or a powerful prophet, but as a baby boy. As the angel told Joseph, the day would come Jesus would save his people from their sins, when he would offer hope to the hopeless and release to the captives—but first, he would be a baby.

When we think about Jesus as Emmanuel, “God with us,” our minds tend to fast-forward to the adult Jesus, the one who so visibly embodied God’s power and presence on earth. It’s easy to understand Jesus as God with us when you imagine him walking on water, raising the dead, and casting out demons. But the truth is, Jesus was God in the flesh from the beginning, from the day he was born and laid in a Bethlehem manger.

And what that means, unbelievably, is that for a time, God not only loved people, he needed them. Like any other baby, Jesus needed to be fed and bathed and clothed, and he was counting on his human parents to do that for him. Strange as it is to imagine, the very life of God’s Son was dependent upon a Nazarene carpenter and his young wife. Before Jesus ever called a disciple or even uttered a word, God was already enlisting people—counting on people—to help carry out His mission, in ways big and small.

There is a reminder there for us today. Just as when God blessed Mary and Joseph with their task, or when Christ called the twelve disciples, or when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the church at Pentecost, today God is depending upon His people to carry out His mission. All believers are called to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God until Christ’s return, to show this world the love of God just as Jesus did, with compassion, holiness, and self-sacrifice. It is not an optional task, nor is it extra credit for overachieving Christians—the mission of God is one entrusted to all of the church. So this Christmas and in the new year to come, may you devote yourself to God’s work. He’s counting on you.

Worth the Wait (Friday Devotional)

“Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.”

- James 5:7-8

If there’s one thing Christmas teaches every year, it’s patience. As a child, you go to bed on Christmas Eve imagining the gifts you’ll receive the next morning, wishing you could open them now—but, your parents tell you, you have to wait. You have to be patient. As an adult, Christmas is a veritable parade of patience—patience in lines at the mall, patience in holiday traffic, patience with your family. For entirely different reasons than when you were a child, you can’t wait for Christmas Day to arrive. But you have to be patient.

So the Advent message is one that resonates through all the stress of the season: be patient. Every year we enter into the story of Jesus’s birth, imagining how we might have responded if we had been Mary or Joseph or a shepherd in the field. We try to empathize with the Jews of that day, eagerly anticipating the arrival of a Messiah and praying for him to come soon. And as we make our way through the story, excited to get to the glory of a Bethlehem night, we can almost hear the Spirit calling: be patient.

Alongside this remembrance of the birth of Christ, Advent calls us to anticipate the day when he will return. “The coming of the Lord is near,” James 5:8 says, and especially during this season of expectation and hope, our eyes should turn to that reality and our hearts should be strengthened because of it. But as we anxiously dream of that glorious day when Christ will come again, the Spirit offers counsel: be patient.

Waiting is hard, but as any child will tell you on Christmas morning, there is nothing quite like the moment when your patience is rewarded. So in this season of Advent, as you are trace Mary and Joseph’s steps toward Bethlehem and look ahead at the steps still to be taken before Christ’s return, may you follow Scripture’s command and wait with the patience that only the Holy Spirit can provide. Don’t worry—Jesus is worth the wait.

Still Learning (Friday Devotional)

“We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor. May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”

- Romans 15:1-2, 5-7

When you’re teaching someone how to play a board game, you have to be patient. Sometimes new players want to read through the rulebook first, other times they just want to dive in and learn as they go. Sometimes they’re full of questions, other times they want to figure it out for themselves. What is plain to you is brand new to them, from basic rules to more complicated strategies, and your task is to walk them through it all until they’ve gotten the hang of it. No doubt about it, the first few times you play a game with a novice, it’s going to be clumsy.

Yet despite that initial awkwardness, you keep going. You don’t get angry at their ignorance and throw the board across the room or demand that they figure things out faster. You offer hints where you can, you gently remind them when they forget a rule, and you let them correct their mistakes to keep the game moving. After all, they’re still learning.

Imagine if we adopted that sort of attitude with our brothers and sisters in the church. After all, every believer is continually growing in the knowledge and faith of Christ, every one of us is still learning. Yet too often we are harsh judges of our fellow Christians, holding them to a standard of perfection that we ourselves could not meet.

Paul offers a good reminder in this season of peace that church harmony doesn’t come from perfection among the saints, but from the mercy we extend to one another. Rather than condemning a brother when he stumbles, the church is called to respond to his repentant spirit with encouragement and forgiveness, welcoming him back with the same grace Christ gives. So in your relationships, especially with fellow believers, may you seek peace with the merciful spirit of Jesus, remembering that all of us are still learning.

Get Dressed (Friday Devotional)

“Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”

- Romans 13:11-12

As best I can tell, groomsmen and bridesmaids have very different experiences in the hours leading up to a wedding. For bridesmaids, the wedding day is a flurry of activity—hair appointments, makeup carefully applied, nails painted, photographs taken. If you walk into the bridesmaids’ dressing room an hour before the wedding, you’re likely to see a dozen different things happening at once.

In the groomsmen’s dressing room…not so much. I remember at my brother’s wedding, a mere 45 minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to begin, all of us were still sitting in our undershirts and gym shorts, with so little to do that we spent half an hour playing catch with a Nerf ball we found lying around. Our dressing room was a picture of laziness and boredom until about 20 minutes before the ceremony began. It was then and only then that we all finally snapped to attention, speedily got dressed, and shifted into wedding mode.

In the early days of the church, believers’ approach to the mission Christ had given them—to make disciples of all nations and to be his witnesses everywhere they went—resembled the feverish activity of the bridesmaids’ dressing room. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, the apostles were always on the move, always preaching and teaching and healing in Jesus’s name. And they worked so frenetically with good reason—they fervently believed that Jesus would return at any moment to consummate the kingdom his ministry had ushered in.

But as time went by, feverish anticipation turned to impatience and then to resignation—perhaps Jesus wasn’t going to return as soon as they’d expected after all. Their former singlemindedness about the mission gave way to a duller, compromised sense of obligation. Before long, the church started to look much more like the groomsmen’s room than the bridesmaids’—sluggishly biding time, unwilling to kick into high gear until the big moment drew a little closer.

Today the church remains trapped in that second mindset, giving lip service to Christ’s imminent return but silently assuming we won’t see it anytime soon. And just like for the church at the end of the first century, that assumption hurts our ministry by sapping it of its urgency and passion. What we need is to recapture the spirit of expectation that gave the early church its earnestness. Scripture tells us Christ’s return is near, and in the meantime we are called to wake from our sleep and set to our task, to “lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”

In this season of Advent, we do two important things: we remember Christ coming for the first time and offering us the hope of salvation, and we look forward to the day when he will come again to fulfill the hope of that salvation. So as you draw hope both from Christ’s past arrival and his future return, may you also be a witness to that hope in the present, eagerly sharing the gospel with your words and your works. At Christ’s return, Scripture speaks of a great wedding between Christ and his bride, the church—so no more sitting around, let’s get dressed!