Today, some words from N.T. Wright about our tendency toward gnosticism, what he calls a “religion of self-discovery.” Somehow this felt appropriate on the eve of the New Year, when many will review the past year and look toward commitments for self-improvement in the New Year. Remembering the history of the past year and looking to the future of the “brand new things” (Isaiah 43) in the coming year are excellent ways to spend today and tomorrow. Let’s do these things focusing on God’s rescue and redemption of us, not as an effort to discover within ourselves that “inner spark of divine life.”

“Along with the radical dualism goes Gnosticism as a religion, not of redemption, but of self-discovery. This is the real ‘false gospel’ at the heart of a good many contemporary debates. The Gnostic does not want to be rescued; he or she wants to discover ‘who they really are’, the inner spark of divine life. …And in some of our most crucial ethical debates people have assumed for a long time that ‘being true to myself’ was all that really mattered (at this point the existentialism and romanticism of the last two hundred years reinforce the underlying gnosticism). This is a religion of pride rather than of faith, of self-assertion rather than of hope, of a self-love which is a parody of the genuinely biblical self-love which is regard for oneself, body and all, as reflecting the image of the creator.

And this false religion, though it often uses the language of Christianity, makes it impossible for people to have real Christian faith, or for that matter real Jewish faith; because in the Bible you discover ‘who you really are’ only when the living God, the creator, is rescuing you and giving you a new identity, a new status, a new name. The Bible is itself the story of, and the energy to bring about, the redemption of creation, ourselves included, not the discovery within ourselves of a spark which just needs to express itself. Gnosticism hates resurrection, because resurrection speaks of God doing a new thing within and for the material world, putting it right at last, rather than God throwing the material world away and allowing the divine spark to float off free. And it is resurrection – the resurrection of Jesus in the past, and of ourselves in the future – which is the ground of all Christian ethical life in the present. Christian ethics is not a matter of ‘discovering who you truly are’ and then being true to that. It is a matter, as Jesus and Paul insist, of dying to self and coming alive to God, of taking up the cross, of inaugurated eschatology, of becoming in oneself not ‘what one really is’ already but ‘what one is in Christ’, a new creation, a small, walking, breathing anticipation of the promised time when the earth shall be filled with God’s glory as the waters cover the sea.

FROM The Bible and Tomorrow, July 30, 2008, http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Lambeth2008.htm

As we turn toward the New Year, this devotion from Oswald Chambers encourages me.  As one who becomes frustrated with the slow process of sanctification, it is good to be reminded that God is indeed growing the virtues of Jesus Christ in me.
“And every virtue we possess”

All my fresh springs shall be in Thee. Psalm 87:7 (P.B.V.).

Our Lord never patches up our natural virtues, He remakes the whole man on the inside. “Put on the new man”—see that your natural human life puts on the garb that is in keeping with the new life. The life God plants in us develops its own virtues, not the virtues of Adam but of Jesus Christ. Watch how God will wither up your confidence in natural virtues after sanctification, and in any power you have, until you learn to draw your life from the reservoir of the resurrection life of Jesus. Thank God if you are going through a drying-up experience!

The sign that God is at work in us is that He corrupts confidence in the natural virtues, because they are not promises of what we are going to be, but remnants of what God created man to be. We will cling to the natural virtues, while all the time God is trying to get us into contact with the life of Jesus Christ which can never be described in terms of the natural virtues. It is the saddest thing to see people in the service of God depending on that which the grace of God never gave them, depending on what they have by the accident of heredity. God does not build up our natural virtues and transfigure them, because our natural virtues can never come anywhere near what Jesus Christ wants. No natural love, no natural patience, no natural purity can ever come up to His demands. But as we bring every bit of our bodily life into harmony with the new life which God has put in us, He will exhibit in us the virtues that are characteristic of the Lord Jesus.

‘And every virtue we possess
Is His alone.’

Today, a meditative reflection from Michael Card’s lyrics, Immanuel.  Read it, sing it, pray it, live it:

A sign shall be given a virgin will conceive

A human baby bearing undiminished deity
The glory of the nations a light for all to see
That hope for all who will embrace His warm reality

Immanuel our God is with us
And if God is with us who could stand against us
Our God is with us
Immanuel

For all those who live in the shadow of death
A glorious light has dawned
For all those who stumble in the darkness
Behold your light has come

Immanuel our God is with us
And if God is with us who could stand against us
Our God is with us
Immanuel

So what will be Your answer? Will You hear the call?
Of Him who did not spare His son but gave Him for us all
On earth there is no power there is no depth or height
That could ever separate us from the love of God in Christ

Immanuel our God is with us
And if God is with us who could stand against us
Our God is with us
Immanuel

Immanuel our God is with us
And if God is with us who could stand against us
Our God is with us
Immanuel

Day 2 of “What is the real meaning of Christmas?”  What difference does it make in our lives that Christ came in the flesh, to dwell with us?  A little more from Manning on the meaning of Christmas.  If you missed yesterday, you might want to read that first.  This is the sequel, two more paragraphs from Brennan Manning’s “The Furious Longing of God”:

“According to that mysterious substitution of Christ for the Christian, what we do to one another, we do to Jesus.  What would Jesus do to the Zacchaeus in your life and mine?  He’d pause, look at them, and love them with such disarming simplicity, such unaccustomed tenderness, and such infectious joy that He’d wring from their calloused hearts real bursts of joy, gratitude, and wonder.  Jesus expected the most of every man and woman, and behind their grumpier poses, their most puzzling defense mechanisms, their coarseness, their arrogance, their dignified airs, their silence, and their sneers and curses, Jesus sees a little child…

How have we gotten it so screwed up?”

To a professional organization, Manning uttered this charge:

…why not be a community of professional lovers that causes people to say, ‘How they love one another!’  Why do we judge Jesus’ criterion for authentic discipleship irrelevant?  Jesus said the world is going to recognize you as His by only one sign:  the way you are with one another on the street every day.  You are going to leave people feeling a little better or a little worse.  You’re going to affirm or deprive them, but there’ll be no neutral exchange.  If we as a Christian community took seriously that the sign of our love for Jesus is our love for one another, I am convinced it would change the world.  We’re denying to the world the one witness Jesus asked for:

LOVE ONE ANOTHER AS I’VE LOVED YOU.  JOHN 15:12″

I would add one reminder to Manning’s exhortation:  Don’t attempt this kind of love in your own strength.  You might make it for an hour, or even a day, but even if you do, it will only lead to your being puffed up in pride at how great a disciple you are.  When we love in the messy places, we won’t know what to do.  We’ll have to get on our knees and ask the Holy Spirit for the right words to say, the right actions to take.  Really forgiving enemies is a process, and we will never do it well in our own strength.  It is only through the grace of God’s forgiveness flowing through us that we will have power to forgive.  Loving one another as Jesus loved us simply doesn’t flow from the American “bootstrap” mentality.  It begins with remembering our stories of rescue, how God loved us and loves us in our curmudgeonly ways and days, it moves daily in imitating Christ’s life here on earth, and it leans forward into the hope that one day we will finally be perfect lovers when Christ comes to complete the restoration projects of our hearts.

For the past several days, we’ve been thinking about the real joy that comes from knowing that Christ is the foundation for our joy.  Today, we shift gears slightly to apply this news practically.  What indeed does it mean that the Lord is come?

Well, right about now, you may be ready for someone to leave — mother, father, cousin, grandma…someone you “tolerate” for 24- 48 hours during the Christmas season, but now it’s time for this incorrigible friend, relative, spouse — fill in the blank — to get out of your way.  Listen to what Brennan Manning says about these people that we struggle to love in The Furious Longing of God:

Is there a Zacchaeus in your life?  Somebody that everybody’s given up on?  Judged incapable of any further good?  Grandaunt, distant cousin, spouse, former spouse, in-law, member of your church, neighbor on your street, colleague at work?  Someone of whom you’ve said, ‘I’ve been wasting my time trying to make you understand anything.  You are incorrigible.  Thank God, I’m quits and free of you.  Don’t you dare to ever darken my door again.’  You probably wouldn’t say that because it’s cruel.  I don’t like to say cruel things either.  They make me feel guilty, and I don’t want to feel guilty.  So, I play it smooth; I call it cool cordiality and polite indifference. Good morning, you dork. In the churches across our land, we allow this garbage to masquerade as the love of Jesus.

Jesus said you are to love one another as I have loved you, a love that will possibly lead to the bloody, anguished gift of yourself; a love that forgives seventy times seven, that keeps no score of wrongdoing.  Jesus said this, this love, is the one criterion, the sole norm, the standard of discipleship in the New Israel of God.  He said you’re going to be identified as disciples, not because of your church-going, Bible-toting, or song-singing.  No, you’ll be identified as His by one sign only:  the deep and delicate respect for one another, the cordial love impregnated with reverence for the sacred dimension of the human personality because of the mysterious substitution of Christ for the Christian.

Jesus is the Prince of Peace, and that’s not just a nice, catchy title.  It means something.  It means that Christmas not only compels us but makes it really doable to forgive and love that incorrigible person in our lives.

A challenge:  Before you click that next tab on your window, close the computer.  Think of at least one “incorrigible” person in your life, and ask the Holy Spirit to help you begin to forgive them and love them.  Ask forgiveness for where your heart has been hard toward them.  Thank Jesus, the Prince who has kissed you with Peace, and extend this kiss to others.

I do hope yesterday was “Joyous,” if not in the gifts or the gatherings, in the sweet assurance that because the “Lord is come,” sins and sorrows need grow no more.  We live in the joy of eternal hope, which has begun now for those who put their trust and place their allegiance in the King Jesus.  Here are a few final words on the hymn “Joy to the World”:

The King who has come has begun a brand new thing, and we should sing Joy to the World every day, or at least several times a year. Why? Because it tells the story of redemption. It tells the story of the past, the present, and the future, not just of me as an individual American Christian, but of how Christ’s coming has and will transform all of Creation. It tells of how we separatists with our shrunken hearts and privatized Christianity will join together, even with nature, to sing of the wonders of His love. I have written more than I intended, but this song gets me really excited. I’ll end here and add a Christmas bonus for those of you who still want more, a short strange story of the odd intersection of heaven and earth that occurred once when this marvelous hymn was sung.

We were in a quite sweet small Christian camp located on the inlet of Wolf Bay. Throughout the weekend we shared the facility with two large high school groups. Mostly we saw them at recreation and meal time. The different tribes tolerated one another fine.

For our final session, we were assigned to a small gazebo near the bay. It was a gorgeous warm morning. We sang our first gathering song acapello – “Take my life and let it be…” Very sweet to hear the voices of about 17 women singing our kingdom call…I spoke for about 20 minutes on Rest and Remembrance when the high school chapel began in a small concrete building around 200 yards up the hill. Heavy bass somewhat distracted my thinking but I managed to wrap it up and play “The Untitled Hymn” as their music stopped for a few moments.

The communion leader spoke to the need for self-examination and offered us a few moments to pray quietly. As we reflected in silence, the big band began really rocking out as their worship time was launched. I squirmed a bit, a little distracted but asked God to help me focus on him and not worry about the other women. We were called to commune, passed the bread and cup and then rose to sing our final song – Joy to the World – all to the accompaniment of pretty loud Christian rock-praise.

Oh I hope you can imagine 17 women singing joyfully to the Lord and tapping our feet to the drum bass and afterwards I just laughed as I prayed and thanked God for giving us this little preview of Kingdom worship – Indeed, let every tribe, tongue, nation, and people group, including women ranging in age from 80 to 18 and a whole bunch of teenagers, join together to sing the praises of our God. After I prayed, one of the women said, ‘And did you hear the bird that came right up to the gazebo and sang with us?”

Indeed, “Let heaven and nature sing!”

Merry Christmas to All.  Enjoy this reflection, continued from yesterday, on how this day marks a new reason for joy to the world:

Verse 2 continues the theme, telling us the response this great good news calls forth from us: “Let men their songs employ.” Not only do we sing this joy to the world, but we do so by living this joy in this world. If we do not live and proclaim this good news, the rocks, hills and plains will. “If they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” (Luke 19:40). We have a story that heaven and nature will sing, so let us sing our songs of redemption with them.

What is this good news of joy to the world? Again, a call and a pronouncement: “No more let sins and sorrows grow.” How can this be? Because the Lord has come to make His blessings known “far as the curse is found.” As I have said in other articles in this series, despite what TV and media may tout regarding the ‘generous human spirit’ roused by the season, I find the opposite to be true of me. The fact is, the Christmas season can bring out the worst in me, where both sins and sorrows are concerned. When I sing this song during the season, I sing with heartfelt joy the reality that sins and sorrows truly will cease because his blessings flow into the deep crevices of my heart where the curse can still be found.

The hymn closes with a final call – to remember that this world is not all there is, that the small kingdoms we create or live in, whether they be called America or some other nation, are just that – very small. Our rulers can rule with truth and grace in some of their finer moments, but a King has come and will come who not only rules with truth and grace at all times and for all eternity but also “makes the nations prove the glories of his righteousness”! Stop and marvel at this. Throughout history, various rulers have tried to make the whole world bow before them and proclaim their glory and righteousness. But their plans have never worked, and more often, they have brought oppression and disaster. Our King, the Lord who has come, will one day make the nations prove the glories of his righteousness because his righteousness does not stop with righteousness but travels on and through the wonders of His love!

Yesterday, I wrote about my struggle with Christmas joy.  Doing so always takes me to my favorite Christmas hymn, which I have learned is not so much a Christmas hymn as it is a hymn that tells the Christian story.  Over the next few days, I’ll re-post some reflections on the hymn, “Joy to the World.”  It really would be good to start by reading the lyrics slowly and reflecting on the song of redemption it sings.

Joy to the World , the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.

Joy to the World, the Savior reigns!
Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders, wonders, of His love.

Re-post from December ‘08:

Faith Hill did a new album this year centering around Isaac Watts’ famous hymn. It is amazing to think how many voices have joined in singing at least the first line and probably the refrain in the last month. In cars, in stores, in churches, in Christmas programs, people have proclaimed, “Joy to the World, the Lord is come!” Perhaps it is the first four words that our secular society is drawn to – indeed, in what could be called a rather depressing year, isn’t joy what the world needs now? And yet, if that were all the world needed, why aren’t more people singing the Three Dog Night version, “Joy to the world, all the boys and girls…Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me!”

I believe people join to sing these words because whether they know it or not or believe it or not, they are deeply drawn to the good news that the Lord IS COME! As Wikipedia says, ‘is come’ is incorrect modern English usage and we would now say, ‘has come.’ Whichever way you put it, the tense is important – present perfect – meaning, as all of my former English students will recall:), the action is completed (perfect) and the action is happening in the present. God is with us in Jesus. And this really is the best news people in our alienated and isolated world can hear.

The hymn also reflects the intersection of heaven and earth that is essential to understanding what God is up to in the world. (And if you want to understand this intersection more, I highly recommend you take that gift certificate to Amazon and order up a copy of N.T. Wright’s, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church). “Let earth receive her King” and “Let every heart prepare him room” remind us that both earth and its inhabitants are impacted by our King’s arrival. “Let heaven and nature sing” remind us that in Christ’s birth, the intersection of heaven and earth has begun.

I wasn’t in the Merriest of moods when yesterday began.  Pushing the darned weights I have to do to protect my shoulders from further injury, I exerted extra propulsion as I wondered, “What in the heck does “Merry” mean anyway?”  I worried that I might strangle the next person to utter those two words to me.  And then I heard Michael W. Smith on the radio say, “It is the most JOYOUS time of the year.”

I proceeded to straighten Michael W. out by telling him exactly what was not JOYOUS about it for a lot of people. Some have lost loved ones in the last year or the last month and are grieving even more intensely during this season.  Some people are miserable because they are maxxing out their credit cards again to buy presents they cannot afford.  For others, loneliness is accentuated in a time of year that seems to be about being together with “loved ones.”

Right about then, as I drove toward home, the Spirit asked me, “Ummmm…what is this about exactly?”  (Well, that’s not quite how the Spirit put it.)  Even so, I remembered that Joy, like Peace, is a central concept of Christmas, so I began to look for it.  Instead of googling “Merry,” I went to Mary’s song, the one she sang right after she was told she would be the mother of the Messiah.  Here’s what it says:

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit REJOICES in God my Savior…”

There is more; she goes on for quite a while about how the mighty God has done great things for her.  But I stopped, struck by the reason for rejoicing, the reason this should be the most JOYOUS time of the year:

Because it is the time we celebrate the anniversary of our “dear Savior’s birth.”  It is not by pretending that broken things work that we find our joy.  It is not in warm fires and generous hearts that we find our joy.  It is in the unchanging circumstance of our God’s love for us that we know JOY.  It is in this strange and impossible birth that we know JOY.  It is in the reality of our story — “the mighty God has done great things for us” that we know JOY.

Joy to the World — THE LORD HAS COME!

N.T. Wright, in his book, The Crown and the Fire, tells the story of meeting a man who didn’t believe Jesus had changed the world.  The man said, “If Jesus died to make it a good place, he didn’t succeed.  Two thousand years is a long time to wait for things to get better.”  Wright tells that he thought of various arguments to the man’s statement but realized what a wrecked world they were standing in (Jerusalem).  Wright writes,

“…if there is an answer to that challenge, it won’t come simply in words.  It will come in flesh and blood.  The word became flesh, said St. John, and the Church has turned the flesh back into words:  words of good advice, words of comfort, words of wisdom and encouragement, yes, but what changes the world is flesh, words with skin on them, words that hug you and cry with you and play with you and love you and rebuke you and build houses with you and teach your children in school.”  N.T. Wright, “The New Creation,” in The Crown and the Fire

One simple question for us all to ponder today:  What words do we need to make flesh today?