My Christmas Reflections

My family had another wonderful Christmas season this year. Wonderful because we had a couple of dinners in our home where we had different groups of people come celebrate the season with us. We had our very own Christmas Eve family dinner. We also enjoyed the love of many who gave us thoughtful gifts. We gave ourselves to share the Good News of Jesus Christ individually and as a church with the Christmas Musical at Victoria Theatre. In all it was indeed a wonderful time of the year for us all.

But for many people the thought of Christmas brings fatigue. It’s not the spiritual aspect that causes the tiredness, but the the overly decorated shops, the shopping, the lights, the Christmas trees, and the carols that begin to echo through our malls already in early November.

And so it is asked: What has all of this, or any of it, got to do with the birth of Jesus? Wouldn’t we honour Jesus more if we spend the money we lavish on Christmas on the poor instead? Don’t our Christmas celebrations serve to obliterate our awareness of Jesus’ birth more than highlight it? Valid questions.

Our Christmas celebrations, admittedly, do start too early, are too-commercially driven, do focus too little on anything spiritual, and do not take the poor sufficiently into account. And so it is easy to be cynical about the Christmas. It contains too many excesses.

However, with that being conceded, we need to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water. Just because something is done badly by the world does not mean it should be cancelled. What is called for, I believe, is not the cancellation of the tinsel, the lights, the socials, the gifts and the food that surround Christmas, but a better use of them. There are good reasons to cancel the practices with which we surround Christmas, but there are even better reasons for keeping them.

What are those reasons? Why continue so many of these practices when, almost invariably, they degenerate into excess and fatigue? Because we have a congenital need to celebrate, pure and simple. As human beings we have a healthy, God-given, genetically-encoded need to sometimes make festival, to have carnival, to celebrate an elaborate Sabbath, to park our cautiousness for a few hours, and to live life as if there wasn’t any reason to pinch our dollars. Christmas is Sabbath, the supreme Sabbath.

There are seasons in life, and these should be on a regular cycle, that are meant precisely for enjoyment, for family, for friends, for colour, for tinsel, and for good food. There is even the occasional time for some prudent excess. Jesus gave voice to this when his disciples were scandalized by a woman’s excess in anointing his feet with perfume and kisses.

All cultures, not least those who are economically poor, have times of festival where, explicitly or implicitly, they take seriously the words: The poor you will always have with you, but today it is time to celebrate. Christmas is such a time, meant for festival.

There is a God-given pressure inside of us that pushes us to celebrate and instils in us an irrepressible sense that we are not meant for quiet gloom, and carefully measured-out relationships, but that we are meant ultimately for the feast, the dance, the place of lights and music, and the place where we don’t measure out our dollars and our hearts on the basis of just having to survive and pay our bills. The celebration of festival and carnival, even with their excesses, help teach us that.

Christmas is such a festival. In the end, its celebration is a lesson in faith and hope and love.
To make a festival of Christmas, to surround Jesus’ birthday with all the joy, lights, music, gift-giving, energy, warmth and evangelism we can muster is, strange as this may sound, a prophetic act. It is, or at least it can be, an expression of faith and hope. It’s not the person who says: “It’s tiring, it's too much work; let’s cancel it!” who radiates hope. That can easily be despair masquerading as faith. No. It is the man or woman who, despite the world’s misuse and abuse of these, still puts up a grand Christmas tree in his living room, strings up the Christmas lights round that tree, turns up the carols on CD, passes gifts to loved ones, sits down at table with family and friends, and flashes a smile to the world; he is the one who is radiating faith, who is saying that we are meant for more than gloom, who is celebrating Jesus’ birth, echoing with the angels, “Glory to God in the Highest, And on earth, peace, goodwill towards men.”

So my family had a wonderful Christmasthis year – with a house well decorated with Christmas cheer; with friends coming over for festive meals and with us sharing Christ with a lost world.

I am so looking forward to another great season of Christmas celebration....next year!

Year End Reflections: A to Z For 2010

Revisit your Ambition. This is a great time to do it. Go back to those early dreams and ask God if you need to revise it and renew it. Ensure that it is alligned to the Word and God-inspiring.

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Breakaway from the common and popular unless you want to remain unchanged. A lot of people do what they do because it has always been done that way. They do it without thinking about the reasons and the meaning behind what they do. Breakaway from what is norm. Seek God for something new, something purposeful, something uncharted, unrehearsed.

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Care for the concerns of people that you care about. Think about being more of a blessing than you have ever been before, especially if you are over 40. Before 40, your life is baout getting but after 40 it is all about giving.

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Demand more from yourself than anybody else ever will in the arena of the spiritual disciplines. You can act when someone asks you to act (external trigger) or you can act simply because you want to grow (internal trigger.) In the long run, internal triggers always work better.

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Engage fully with what you are doing. It is not worth doing anything half-heartedly. Even if it is fun, engage in it fully. You only have 365 days in a year. With weekends and holidays gone, you have close to 250 days. That’s about 6000 hours. With sleep and some TV and rest, you get close to half of that available to you. That’s about 3000 hours. If you are not engaged in these 3000 hours, you can be guaranteed that you will be stressed out in whatever hours outside of those 3000 hours.

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Fail fast. Fail often. Fail brilliantly. If you fear failure, you will stop taking risks and when you stop taking risks you will do what is common and popular (in other words risk-free). And you will never know what you miss unless you take some risk.

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Give first. You get back so much more when you give and what you get back will have greater retrnal value than you can possibly imagine.

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Humility is an “invisible” competitive advantage. With the world changing at breathtaking speed, there is no guarantee that what worked yesterday will work today and what works today will work tomorrow. Humilty helps you grow with greater grace. It oils your life for change in a fast-changing world.

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Intensity wins. Big time. Think about the time you were playing a game and were totally engrossed in it. Those were the moments of high-intensity. Winning was important but at that particular moment, you were just playing with high-intensity. That is the way the game of life is played. With high intensity. Intensely hunger after God Increase your intensity by a notch or two in 2010.

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Join a team. Join a movement. Join a tribe that wil forge for you a strong sense of community. Join something that will make help you make a bigger difference in this world. You can only do so much on your own. With the right tribe, the possibilities are endless.

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Knowing what NOT to do is equally important as knowing what to do. Before the start of the year, think of a few things that are not worth continuing. Dis-engage from these activities gracefully so that you have more bandwidth to do things that do matter. Think a decade, not just a year. 2010 is the beginning of a whole new decade.

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Love your work. How much you love your work shows up in your work. Putting your heart into what you are doing is that “extra” that can make your work extraordinary for the Lord.

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Make meaning. Both for yourself and people who you touch. Everybody is in search for more meaning in their lives. And there is no meaning without God so ensure He is in the equation of everything in your life.

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Nurture relationships for the long-term. There are only two kinds of relationships – one is long-term and the other one is very long term. Very long-term relationships won’t happen in the short-term or by accident. You need nurture those relationships.

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Be on the lookout for opportunities to contribute. Opportunities are everywhere. They come to those people who are ready and willing to put in the effort to capitalize on them.

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Passion on the right priorities with the right amount of patience will create profits. Identify your passions. Allign them to your priorities. Patiently wait for God to produce for you the profits.

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Question your questions. If the questions you are asking until now have not given the results so far, it is time to question those questions. It’s time to ask new and powerful questions. The Holy Spirit seraches the heart that is open to questions.

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Results matter. But they do not matter as much as the process to the results. The journey is more important than the destination. Focus on the process. Leave the results to God.

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Capitalize on your strengths.. AND, find good help to handle your weaknesses. But remember, if you only bang on your strengths, they have a way of becoming your weakness.

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Thoughtfulness may not cost you much but people notice it. It shows that you care for them and they are important enough for you to walk that extra mile.

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Understand first and then people would want to understand you. If you think someone is not able to understand you, think about the possibility that they might be thinking the same way about you . This is tough but yields great relational returns.

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Check your values. They are the foundation for whatever you say or do. The building is only as strong as the foundation and you are only as strong as your values.

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Don't lose your sense of Wonder to ensure that you are always learning. You can’t know everything. Not now. Not in a decade and not in a lifetime. Be in a mood of wonder as a student of life. Most of all, don't ever lose your Wonder of God or you lose your ability to worship Him.

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Be very careful about SEX. It is a fire. Place in the right location(marriage) it contributes. Taken out of its location, it destrys. Don't let what you have build over the years be burned down in one night.

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Yearning for more of God today will yield good returns tomorrow. Be more hungry foe God and His Word in 2010 then ever before. It is a discipline to be cultivated.

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Zap negative thinking. Zap laziness. Zap procrastination. Zap skepticism. Zap anything that will reduce your capacity or the capacity of others around you. It is simply not worth carrying the extra baggage. Repeat with Paul: Rejoice and again I say Rejoice!

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Lessons From Geneologies

When you re-read the Christmas narratives in the Gospels, you will inevitably come across the geneologies - the list of names in the line of Jesus. What lessons can we learn from the geneologies?

Here are a few lessons from the genealogies:

1) God's plan is bigger than your past mistakes

Jesus' genealogy is filled with scandal. You have prostitutes and egomaniacs and evil tyrants in the mix. One of the less savoury stories involves Judah and Tamar. I'll spare you the sordid details, but a father-in-law propositions a daughter-in-law who he thinks is a prostitute. And a child is conceived. You could call her children, Perez and Zerah, a mistake.

In fact, in our day, this pregnancy would have been a prime candidate for abortion. But they were more than that. They were part of God's master plan. They were part of the genealogy of Jesus. Can I offer a simple reminder from the genealogies? God is bigger than your sexual mistakes.

2) Who goes before you isn't as important as who you leave behind

Many people who come from dysfunctional families are afraid that they are destined to make the same mistakes their parents made. You wonder if it's in your genes. Can I remind you that you aren't your parents and your parents aren't you. You can break the cycle. You can rise above the mistakes they made. You can leave a legacy. Jesus had some messed up ancestors!

3) You can be part of His genealogy

I love this promise in John 1: "To as many as have received him, to them he gave the power to become children of God." When you put your faith in Christ, you become part of His family,

His genealogy, His legacy!

Teaching Leaders

In 1 Timothy 3 Paul says , “Elders must be able to teach.” While I value the gift of teaching, requiring it as a quality for this level of church leadership seemed to be so restricting. But now after 20 years in church leadership myself, I totally agree leaders must be teachers.

• Leadership is the ability to influence the thoughts, attitudes and skills of others which requires an ability to teach.
• Leadership means identifying and equipping future leaders which requires an ability to teach.
• Leadership is building a team of people and focusing them on a common mission which requires an ability to teach.

Now before you disqualify yourself as a leader please understand I’m not talking about the traditional standing in front of a classroom and dispensing information. I’m talking about being alert to capitalize on teachable moments, available to debrief successes and struggles of those you lead and being astute of those who are hungry students of leadership in your minstry. Teaching leaders will have a multitude of growing leaders in their wake.

What adjustments do you need to make to become a teaching leader?

When God Is At Work

In The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), Jonathan Edwards pulled out of 1 John 4 the biblical indicators that God is at work, even if the people involved are complicating it with their own sins and eccentricities. The true gold of grace is discernible in these four ways:

One, when our esteem of Jesus is being raised, so that we prize him more highly than all this world, God is at work.

Two, when we are moving away from Satan’s interests, away from sin and worldly desires, God is at work.

Three, when we are believing, revering and devouring the Bible more, God is at work.

Four, when we love Jesus and one another more, God is at work.

Satan not only wouldn’t produce such things, he couldn’t produce them, so opposite are these from his nature and purposes. These are sure signs that God is at work, even with the imperfections we inevitably introduce.

Joseph And Christmas

I have been studying the Christmas narratives again. What a wealth of understand the scripture offer. You can read the Word again and again and you find fresh treasures all over again.

Who exactly is the Joseph of Christmas? He is that quiet figure prominently named in the Christmas story as the husband of Mary and the stepfather of Jesus, and then basically is never mentioned again. He was probably an older man, a safe protector to Mary, a carpenter by trade, upright and holy, humble and quiet, steady and patient.

But what do we really know about him?

In the Gospel of Matthew the annunciation of Jesus' conception is given to Joseph rather than to Mary: before they came together, Mary was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit. Joseph, her husband, being an upright man and unwilling to shame her, had decided to divorce her quietly, when an angel appeared to him in a dream and told him not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife, that the child in her had been conceived through the Holy Spirit.

What can we learn from this text?

Partly it is symbolic: The Joseph of the Christmas story is clearly reminiscent of the Joseph of the Exodus story, he too has a dream, he too goes to Egypt, and he too saves the family. Likewise King Herod is clearly the counterpart of the Egyptian Pharaoh; both feel threatened and both kill the Hebrew male children only to have God protect the life of the one who is to save the people.

But, after that, the Joseph of the Christmas story writes his own history: He is presented to us as an "upright" man, a designation that scholars say implies that he has conformed himself to the Law of God, the supreme Jewish standard of holiness. In every way he is blameless, a paradigm of goodness, which he demonstrates in the Christmas story by refusing to expose Mary to shame, even as he decides to divorce her quietly.

What actually happened here?

The background, in so far as we can reconstruct it, to the relationship between Joseph and Mary would have been this: The marriage custom at the time was that a young woman, essentially at the age of puberty, would be given to a man, usually several years her senior, in an arranged marriage by her parents. They would be betrothed, technically married, but would not yet live together or begin sexual relations for several more years. The Jewish law was especially strict as to the couple remaining sexually pure while in the betrothal period. During this time, the young woman would continue to live with her parents and the young man would go about setting up a house and an occupation so as to be able to support his wife once they began to live together.

Joseph and Mary were at this stage of their relationship, legally married but not yet living together, when Mary became pregnant. Joseph, knowing that the child was not his, had a dilemma: if he wasn't the father, who was? In order to save his own reputation, he could have demanded a public inquiry and, indeed, had Mary been accused of adultery, it might have meant her death. However, he decided to "divorce her quietly", that is, to avoid a public inquiry which would leave her in an awkward and vulnerable situation.

Then, after receiving revelation in a dream, he agrees to take her home as his wife and to name the child as his own. Partly we understand the significance of that, he spares Mary embarrassment, he names the child as his own, and he provides an accepted physical, social, and religious place for the child to be born and raised. But he does something else that is not so evident: He shows how a person can be a devoted believer, deeply faithful to everything within his religious tradition, and yet at the same time be open to a mystery beyond both his human and religious understanding. It took so much faith in God to obey God based on something unheard of in his day and time.

And this was exactly the problem for any Christian, including the religious leaders at the time the Gospels were written: They were pious Jews who didn't know how to integrate Christ into their religious framework. What does one do when God breaks into one's life in new, previously unimaginable ways? How does one respond to the God who does what He deems fit when it is not something familiar to my background, experience, tradition or preference?

There is a mystery about God and the way He works that will continually demand our obedience. It is then that we have to base our faith on Christ, not tradition, expereince or preference.

Isn't that one of the ongoing challenges of Christmas?

A Life-Enriching Social Environment

Strong, deep, lasting love amongst us – who wouldn’t want to be a part of that? Three ways to create that culture in our ministries and churches:

One, “Outdo one another in showing honour” (Romans 12:10). No flippant put-downs. No undercutting. Not even waiting for the next person to make the first move. But me getting out of my self-concern to lift the next guy up with high honour. Doing this verbally, unashamedly.

Two, “Bear with one another” (Colossians 3:13). Not trying to change one another. Who appointed us to that role? Our privilege is to bear with one another’s “weaknesses and oddities, which are such a trial to our patience, . . . to break through to the point where we take joy in [the other person’s quirkiness]” (Bonhoeffer, Life Together, page 101).

Three, “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths but only such as is good for building up” (Ephesians 4:29). The people of God filter every word by a higher standard. Even if the words wanting to come out of my mouth are factually true, the real question is, ‘Are my words positively helping the person listening?’

People of God loving one another intensely and openly are a life-enriching social environment.

Such an environment is full of the Holy Spirit. It helps us all grow. Let’s work towards it!