You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December, 2008.
Well, here we are again, at the beginning of a new year! Folks are planning New Year’s Eve celebrations, buying the pork & sauerkraut or black-eyed peas and collard greens for ‘lucky’ New Years dinners. Guys are setting up marathon college football bowl parties with dozens of their closest friends, and in some cities, like Philadelphia PA, hundreds of grown men and women are putting the finishing touches on mammoth sequins & feather costumes for the city’s annual Mummer’s Day parade! New Years weekend is a big party time in most of the US.
Bill Johnson has an awesome message this week – Favor Like Jesus – that has given me a new understanding of Jesus’ birth and presence in our world. Most believers agree that Jesus is God. But many of us miss the fact that when he became human, he became fully human. He surrendered the God powers to His Father and the Holy Spirit. Scripture confirms this.
Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:7-8.)
Jesus told the people: I tell you for certain that the Son cannot do anything on his own. He can do only what he sees the Father doing, and he does exactly what he sees the Father do. I cannot do anything on my own. The Father sent me, and he is the one who told me how to judge. I judge with fairness, because I obey him, and I don’t just try to please myself. (John 5:19, 30)
As I drove home from work at night this week along the back roads, passing house after house covered with Christmas lights, I felt the ‘Christmas Grinch’ going away! No contempt for all the commercial trappings, no scorn for the monstrous Frosty the Snowman and Santa lawn ornaments, just peaceful, wondrous glee!
Yes, I know…I thought about all those financially-strapped home owners, opening their $1500 December electric bills, and the irony that most Americans can afford to light up our neighborhoods while much of the world’s neighborhoods have no electricity at all. I thought about all of that…but still, in the darkness, driving home, I have been unaccountably overcome with feelings of wonder and joy, and real, unshakable peace . . .
