In a matter of days, it will be 2023 and I have still not got used to writing “2022” on checks and papers. What has happened to the time? People talk about timesaving hacks and timesaving gadgets – we even have daylight savings time – but time cannot be saved. It can only be – must be – spent, either well or poorly. Each new year reminds us of the fact.
The New Year’s holiday offers us an opportunity to reflect on this. Am I spending time well? Are there things I could do differently that would make me more productive, bring lasting benefit to others, or increase my joy?
The biblical writers encourage such self-reflection. St. Paul, for example, instructed readers to “Be very careful, then, how you live.” A more literal translation is: “Look carefully at how you walk” – where “walk” serves as a metaphor for one’s journey through life. The apostle is urging people to take a close look at their lives.
This call to take a careful look at our lives is common in Scripture. We find frequent exhortations like this: “Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves.” St. Paul says, “If we judged ourselves rightly, we would not be judged.” Jesus himself urged people to “consider carefully what you hear.” The Greek for this is striking: “See what you hear.” In other words, pay attention to how you pay attention.
The danger is that we will go through life mindlessly and thereby miss out on opportunities to become the strong, joyful people that God intends us to be. St. Paul continues his instruction this way: “Be very careful, then, how you live – not as unwise but as wise.” He explains the difference between being wise and unwise in the next sentence. The unwise person has “become foolish” – the word means “unthinking” or “mindless” – while the wise person “understands what the will of the Lord is.”
The great saint knew that the temptation to mindlessness is strong. Humans are escapists by nature. Some of us have been trapped in boring routines while others are captive to non-stop stress. Many are locked into addictions that, ironically, began as escape attempts. Rather than facing our situation and acknowledging the pain it causes, we seek to “become unthinking.” Television shows, social media platforms, video games, sporting events, and even coffee klatch politicking owe their popularity to this desire.
St. Paul explains what it means to live wisely with the words, “making the most of every opportunity,” or, as the King James Version translated it, “redeeming the time.” Though time cannot be saved, it can, apparently, be redeemed – or “bought,” as the root word signifies. Buying up opportune moments is a pillar of the wise person’s investment strategy.
Why is it important to redeem the time? An illustration may help. In 1271 Niccolo and Matteo Polo (the father and uncle of Marco) were visiting the Kubla Khan, who was arguably the most powerful man in the world. He ruled all of China, all of India and most of the East.
And he was interested in Christianity. He told the Polo brothers: “Go to your high priest and tell him to send a hundred men skilled in the Christian faith to instruct us. When they come, I shall be baptized, and when I am baptized all my barons and great men will be baptized, and their subjects will receive baptism, too, and so there will be more Christians here than there are in your part of the world.”
But the Polo’s did not redeem the time. No one was sent for thirty years, and then only two or three missionaries went. Too few and too late. William Barclay has written: “It baffles the imagination to think what a difference to the world it would have made if in the thirteenth century China had become fully Christian, if in the thirteenth century India had become fully Christian, if in the thirteenth century the East had been given to Christ.”
The Polo’s did not buy up the opportune moment. We would be living in a different world today if they had. Perhaps mindlessness got the better of them. Will it get the better of us too?
God promised to send the Immanuel – the “with-us-God” – and his word never fails. This week we rejoice in the fact that God always keeps his word. The Jesus of Bethlehem is proof!
For the third week of Advent, we look at John the Baptist, the great roadbuilder for God. But the great roadbuilder was imprisoned and beginning to question what he had once believed: that Jesus was the Messiah. How did he address his doubts? We see that in Matthew 11:2-11. We also see how Jesus wonderfully addressed his esteemed doubter. (The sermon lasts about 26 minutes. The text can be found below.)
Viewing time: 26 minutes (approx.)
When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?” Jesus replied, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me.”
John the Baptist gets a lot of press during the Advent season. He makes it into the gospel readings on both the second and thirds Sundays of Advent, Perhaps the church realized that we, like John, are waiting for Christ to claim his kingdom. And, as we wait, our situation may, like his, be fraught with trouble. We too may face discouragement and doubt.
John was a road-builder – or, rather, John was the roadbuilder. His work was to make ready the way of the Lord. We too are roadbuilders. The things we say and the way we conduct ourselves should smooth the rough places, level the highs and lows, and prepare the way. Like John, we are not so much preparing the way for people to come to Jesus as we are preparing the way for Jesus to come to people. It is Jesus who is (to borrow John’s own words) “the Coming One.”
It is easy to get this backwards – especially for pastors. We think that the truths we speak, or the hopes we inspire, or the insights we share are preparing the way for people to come to Jesus. But behind that way of thinking is a mental picture of a stationary Jesus. It’s the people who move or don’t move (or need us to move them) toward Jesus.
But that is not the right way to look at it for it assumes that God does nothing, and people must do everything. If it is up to people to come to God and they aren’t coming, then it is up to us to move them – by what means necessary, including strong-arm sales techniques and emotional manipulation. After all, if they don’t come to God, they will go to hell. We forget that God will come to them.
He comes first to rescue them: He woos them; he calls them; he rebukes them; he draws them; he reveals himself to them. He “stands at the door and knocks,” but gives them the choice of acknowledging him or ignoring him. He gives them the choice this time. The next time he comes, there will be no choice. As a roadbuilder, my obedience to Jesus Christ prepares the for God to come to people.
This is work I can do. I don’t need to be someone I’m not – an eloquent speaker or a high-powered salesperson. God will come to people, and I can be part of the roadbuilding crew that prepares the way for him.
This kind of roadbuilding goes beyond good deeds and persuasive words. Much of the work involves making changes in our own lives, for who we are is more important that what we say or do. Repentance is roadbuilding work. Sacrificing time or money can be roadbuilding work, as is the renewal of our minds. The presentation of our bodies as living sacrifices is roadbuilding work. Much of what happens in roadbuilding happens inside us.
You see, the road we’re building for God runs through us. God intends us to be the way by which he comes to people. This was true of Jesus. Remember what he said? “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). As the Father sent him, so Jesus sends us. The road Christ travels to our friends and family – and even our enemies – runs through our words and actions, our hopes, our love, our prayers.
But sin leaves potholes in that road. A flood of anger can close the road entirely. Self-absorption leads to detours. If we are going to build a road on which our Lord can come to the people we know, we cannot ignore such things. It is not enough for our words to tell people that Jesus is there; our lives must convey him to them.
John the Baptist was the roadbuilder par excellence. But even the road he built became obstructed. To understand how that happened, we need a little background.
John got on the wrong side of Herod Antipas, was arrested and thrown into prison in the fortress of Machaerus. I have been in prisons in Ohio, Michigan, and Virgina, but I have never been imprisoned. I find the sound of closing prison doors disturbing even though I know those doors will open again in an hour to let me out. I can only imagine what it would be like to hear those doors close knowing that they were not going to open again.
I read about a guy named Stuart McCallister who, in the 1980s, smuggled Bibles into Eastern Europe. He was caught and thrown into prison. He had no idea what his captors intended to do with him. He didn’t know if anyone was coming for him – or even knew where he was. He started off his incarceration expecting that God would rescue him quickly – after all, wasn’t he doing God’s work?
With no word and no change in his situation, it was only a short time before he began questioning God’s apparent lack of response. It didn’t stop there. His thoughts quickly evolved from, “Why isn’t God doing anything?” to “God isn’t going to do anything.” Then from there, he began to question whether God cared – or was he even there.
Of course, I wouldn’t doubt like that … or would I? The loneliness, the complete uncertainty, lack of sleep, lack of privacy, strange, unappetizing food, my routine shot to pieces – perhaps I would come undone even faster than he did.
Stuart was in prison for a matter of weeks. John was in prison a lot longer. And remember, the vast outdoors had been John’s home, but now he was restricted to a few square feet and bounded by walls and bars. Remember too that John ate a very unique and specific diet for years, but he was now given food that he couldn’t stomach. If you were in that situation, you would lose weight and then strength. As you sat in that cell day after day, and month after month, the person you thought yourself to be would gradually disappear. You would hardly recognize yourself.
John sat through interminable days and even longer nights. His active mind must have screamed in protest. He had announced that the judgment of the wicked was at hand—but nothing had happened. Why was God delaying? What was Jesus – whom he testified to be the Messiah – doing? Had he been mistaken?
John was not the first of God’s people to experience this kind of thing. The prophet Jeremiah accused God of deceiving him and cursed the day on which he was born. Job nearly lost his mind. David cried out to God, “How long, O Lord, how long? Will you forget me forever?” (Ps. 13:1). Elijah, who was John’s hero and model, fell into so deep a depression that he wanted to die. These were great people – heroes of the Bible. If they could feel this way, what about you and me?
So, John was in prison and having doubts about Jesus. A similar fate might await some of us before Jesus returns. Such a fate is already the lot of Jesus’s people is some parts of the world. How can they stand before their doubts and remain true to God? How can we?
The first step is to examine our assumptions. Doubt does not usually start with our beliefs being disproved but with our assumptions being upended. Stuart McCallister, who was held in a communist prison in the Eastern Bloc, later said: “I expected God to do certain things, and to do them in a sensible way and time. I expected that God would act fairly quickly and that I would sense his intervention. My reading of Scripture, my grasp of God’s promises, my trust in the reliability of God’s Word, the teaching I had received, and the message I had embraced, had led me to expect certain things, and in a particular way. When this did not occur in the way I expected, or in the timing that I thought it should, I was both confused and angry … I was unaware how many unexamined assumptions I was living by.”[1]
Unexamined assumptions. We all have them. And sometimes they are mistaken. Big Ed went to a revival meeting and was deeply moved by the preaching. After the service, when people were asked to come forward for prayer, Big Ed got in line. When it was his turn, the preacher asked, “Ed, what do you want me to pray for?”
Big Ed said, “I need prayer for my hearing.”
So, the preacher put one finger in Big Ed’s ear and the other hand on top of his head and prayed loudly and exuberantly for some minutes. Then he removed his hands and asked, “How’s your hearing now?”
Confused, Big Ed answered, “I don’t know preacher. The hearing’s not until next Wednesday.”
Everyone (but God) has unexamined assumptions. John did. He assumed that Jesus would rain down judgment on the heads of unbelievers. He expected him to “cut down every tree that does not bear fruit and throw it into the fire” (Luke 3:9) and to do it quickly. John wasn’t wrong, but his timetable was.
If you are having doubts, trace them back to their origin. I’ve known people who have been driven by doubt to throw their beliefs overboard. But their doubts didn’t come from their beliefs; they came from their assumptions. Assumptions can be wrong even when our beliefs are right.
Such was the case with John’s role model Elijah. Elijah was operating with a set of mistaken assumptions. He assumed that everything would be alright once his battle with Ahab and Jezebel was won. It was not. He assumed that he alone had remained faithful to God. He was wrong. He assumed that he would retire when his work was wrapped up. He did not.
When his assumptions began to fall like dominoes, his doubts – about himself, about other people, about God – came out into the open. God did not let Elijah down; his assumptions did. Those mistaken assumptions had to be exposed before Elijah could be restored, and that was a slow and painful process.
Perhaps we are operating with some mistaken assumptions. For example, we might assume that we will have justice in this life. We might assume that good health is normative, and that people who work hard and are fiscally responsible will have enough. But what will happen if we experience gross injustice or, after years of eating right and exercising, our health fails, or our retirement investments lose half their value in a matter of weeks?
We probably won’t doubt our assumptions even then; but there is a danger that we will doubt our God. We won’t doubt our assumptions because we don’t know that we have any; by their very nature, they remain invisible to us. How we need God’s help – and his people’s – to remain true!
If you are experiencing doubts, find out where they are coming from. It’s likely that they are sourced in your assumptions, which you have not examined, rather than in your beliefs, which you have. We all need to learn to doubt our doubts.
Even though John was doubting Jesus, doubting himself, wondering if he had been mistaken, he did one thing right. He went to Jesus with his doubts. I’ve seen other people, plagued by doubt, go everywhere but to Jesus. They go to the internet. They go to their friends. They go to a counselor. But they don’t go to God. He could help. He would help.
As John’s doubts gnawed at him, he sent two of his disciples (according to Luke) to Jesus to put the question to him. This is verse 3: “Are you the one who is to come,” – literally, the Coming One, that is, the Messiah – or shall we look for another?” Matthew’s Greek here is revealing. There were two words at his disposal that could be translated “another.” One means, “Another of the same kind.” That was the word Jesus used when he told the disciples that the Father would send them “another comforter” – “another like me.”
But the word used in John’s question means, “another of a different kind.” John is asking, “Are you the one – or is God still going to send the other kind of Messiah, the one who conquers, who destroys our enemies and establishes righteousness?”
Going to Jesus was the right thing to do. Notice how Jesus responded. He did not say, “Of course, I am the one; you said so yourself.” He knew that would not clear up John’s doubts. Instead of telling John what to think, he simply provided him with the evidence he needed and let him think for himself. It is impossible to persuade someone out of their doubts, for the door of doubt is locked on the inside and it is the doubter who must unlock it. The best we can do is slip them the key.
Look at the evidence that Jesus presented (verse 5): “the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.” Jesus is reminding John of Isaiah 35, the passage that was read for us earlier. He is giving John a chance to bring his doubts into the light of the Scriptures. He is slipping him the key.
We can learn a lesson from this: Always go back to Scripture. We need to see God, Jesus, ourselves, and others through the lens of Scripture, not the lens of our assumptions. We are all myopic – some of us terribly so – and only the Scriptures can correct our vision. Jesus knew that John would see him clearly once he saw him through the lens of Scripture.
Put yourself in Jesus’s place for a moment. The first and most prestigious person to support you is now questioning your legitimacy. John is doubting Jesus. No one likes to be doubted; it is blow, a threat – and coming from someone of John’s stature, doubts could have an enormously negative impact on public opinion.
Over the years, various people, some I didn’t even know and some who were close to me, have doubted me. When I was younger, the very fact that someone had doubts about me hurt me, and the better they knew me the more it hurt. When someone expressed doubts about me – my rightness, my ability, my motives – I felt threatened, got defensive, and tried to prove myself. I saw the doubter as an antagonist and, of course, myself as the protagonist. If they suspected my motives, I suspected theirs. If they criticized my ideas, I poked holes in theirs.
As I say, that was when I was younger. I am not so confident of myself now and so I am not so threatened by people’s doubts and questions. I am not so confident in myself, but I am more confident in my savior. As my hope has grown, my doubts have shrunk. That is the way God intends it to work.
John doubted Jesus but Jesus – how beautiful is this? – never doubted John (11:11). He did not get defensive. He did not cast John as an antagonist, didn’t question his motives, or criticize his ideas. Instead of standing up to John, he stood up for John. Jesus does not get angry at doubters. He encourages them.
Let’s wrap this up. First, if you are a doubter or have one in your family or among your close friends, don’t panic. Entrust the doubter to God, even if the doubter is you. Don’t panic. That will increase the person’s doubts because they will see that you don’t trust God either.
Second, take the doubter to the Scriptures. God still meets people there. If you can’t take people to the Scriptures like Jesus did because you don’t know the Scriptures, that is the place to start. You need to know the Bible. Get into a D-group or a Bible Study group and start your own regular practice of Bible reading and prayer.
Third, remember it is not all up to you to move people to God – that puts way too much pressure on you! God will come to them and the road by which he comes can run through you! Just make sure that you are dealing with your own sins and doubts – keep the road open and free of obstacles.
[1] Quoted in Ravi Zacharias, Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend (Thomas Nelson, 2007), pp. 258-261
The holiday movie “Violent Night”brought in nearly five million dollars on its opening night and doubled that during its opening weekend. The film cost about 20 million dollars to make, which is cut-rate by today’s standards (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” cost ten times that much) and has already grossed more than its production costs.
According to Peter Sobczynski, writing for RogerEbert.com, the story’s premise is that a tremendously wealthy family is set upon by a mercenary gang of thieves, intent on stealing millions. The family is rescued by a cursing, killer Santa Claus, who beats the bad guys to a pulp—and worse. This R-rated film is clearly not meant for families hoping to get into the spirit of the holiday.
“Violent Night” is not the first holiday entertainment to feature Christmas violence. The 1988 Bill Murray film, “Scrooged,”presented a bogus movie trailer for a sham movie titled, “The Night the Reindeer Died.” In the trailer, Santa’s north pole workshop comes under attack. Mr. and Mrs. Claus rally the elves and supply them with combat weapons to fight off the attackers—with the help of the actor Lee Majors. More recently, a blasphemous movie short was made with the same title.
A future historian might speak of how violence entered the Christmas season in 1979, the year the song, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” was introduced. In 2000, an animated Christmas television special of the same name aired. In 1988 came the facetious trailer, “The Night the Reindeer Died,” followed by the blasphemous movie short of the same name. And now we have “Violent Night,” whose producers are already planning a sequel.
Our future historian would present a compelling case that violence entered the holiday season in the latter part of the twentieth century, but he would be mistaken. Violence surrounding Christ’s birth dates back to the very first century – a violence that was more gruesome than anything the writers of Violent Night included.
After Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Magi from the East came to pay tribute to “the one born King of the Jews.” When Herod, who claimed the title “King of the Jews” for himself, learned about this, he panicked. A legitimate king was a threat to himself and to his royal line – a threat he was determined to remove.
Herod the Great was a genius, a brilliant military strategist and a remarkable architect. But he was an evil genius. When Herod suspected (wrongly) that two of his sons were planning a coup, he had them strangled. His patron, the Emperor Augustus, once quipped in Greek, “It is safer to be Herod’s pig (hus) than his son (huios).
Herod also killed his wife, her mother, his brother-in-law (by drowning) and, during the week of his death, yet another son. Before he died, he had 70 of the leading members of Israeli society arrested and held so that they could be executed at the moment of his passing. He said that he knew people wouldn’t grieve for him and he wanted there to be tears. Fortunately, his orders were not carried out.
Of the all the atrocities Herod committed, the worst was the murder of every boy under the age of two living in or around Bethlehem. Herod thought that in this way he could eliminate the threat posed by the “one born King of the Jews.” He sent his soldiers into the community suddenly and without warning. When they left, Bethlehem wailed, and most did not even know why their sons and grandsons had been killed.
God did not send his Son into a peaceful world but into a violent one. He did not come to a society ball but to a bloodbath, as the “Massacre of the Innocents” demonstrates. Bethlehem was a beachhead, and Christmas was D-Day. No wonder an entire company of the heavenly army appeared in the skies over Bethlehem.
Evil Herod grasped what our schmaltzy Christmas cards miss: the birth of Jesus marked an invasion. Some, like Herod, regarded it as an attack; others welcomed it as a rescue mission, but no one then thought it schmaltzy. Neither should anyone now.
Hope is more than a feeling, more than a wish. It is more than “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul” (Emily Dickinson). Hope is an objective reality outside the soul which protects the soul. It is an “anchor for the soul, firm and secure” (Hebrews 6:19).
Be encouraged by this minute of Advent Hope. – Shayne
Our hope includes seeing our loved ones again when Christ returns. They will astound us with their glory. It includes being glorified ourselves in the Great Revealing (Colossians 3:3-4). But our greatest hope is in the glory of God (Romans 5:2), for “we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:1-3). This is the beatific vision. Its glory causes us to catch our breath at the humility of God in Christ, who took human form (“the body of our lowliness,” Philippians 3:21 – literal) “for us and for our salvation.”
Peggy Noonan’s lede in her Wall Street Journal column from October 15, 2020 read: “Everyone’s insane now. I mean everyone in Washington.”
It is not uncommon for people, even columnists for respected newspapers, to speak of government officials in this way. They are usually referring to the people on the other side of the aisle, but Ms. Noonan advocates for inclusivity: “Everyone’s insane now.”
Note the word, “now.” The implication is that there was a time when not everyone was crazy. Was there less insanity when Ms. Noonan’s boss, Ronald Reagan, was in the Oval Office? Perhaps. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
Craziness in government is nothing new. Had Ms. Noonan been writing in the time of Christ, she might have used the same lede, with this clarification: “I mean everyone in Rome.” The Gospel of Luke lists the names of officeholders at the time Jesus burst onto the scene. This was a standard method for dating events, but it was also St. Luke’s way of reminding his readers that God is at work in the real world.
The people the Evangelist mentions were not mythical. It would be like me bringing up Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell in reference to something that was going on in our church and community. The men on Luke’s list were real people, exercising influence (for good or bad) in the real world.
God is not working in some ethereal spiritual world while life goes on in the “real” world. The “real” world is itself spiritual, shot through with divine activity. That is as true now as it was when Tiberius was the Roman emperor.
Tiberius was the poster child for insanity in government, though his heir Caligula made him look almost normal. As he grew older, the Emperor became paranoid and cruel. Seneca says that he was positively rude and insulting. Toward the end of his reign, he was executing people for saying things he didn’t like. He started spending less time in the capitol, and more time on the Isle of Capri, which was a hotbed of sexual deviancy. When he died, protestors in the streets wanted his body dumped in the Tiber River, which was how the corpses of criminals were disposed.
Luke also mentions Pontius Pilate. He was the Roman governor of Judea who ordered Jesus’s execution. The Jews hated him, and asked Tiberius to recall him. Pilate used treasury money as if it were his personal account, and when people protested, he sent his troops into the streets in plain clothes with orders to infiltrate the protestors and kill as many as possible. It was a massacre. Tiberius reprimanded Pilate but stopped short of removing him from office.
Herod Antipas also made Luke’s list. He was the regional administrator who had founded the gleaming city of Tiberius on the shores of Lake Galilee. It was he who ordered the beheading of John the Baptist and later attempted to have his own nephew imprisoned. He was sly, power-hungry, and unfaithful to multiple spouses.
If we had lived in Palestine in the year 28 AD, which would have been the 15th year of Tiberius’s reign, we probably would have been saying, “Everyone’s insane now.” Nevertheless, God was at work, accomplishing his purpose. The insanity of Rome – or, for that matter, Washington – cannot stop him.
As we approach Christmas, we must keep this in mind. The God who was at work in the world then is at work in the world now. The God who sent his only begotten Son will send him again.
“The meaning of Christmas,” a New York Times op-ed piece once claimed, “is that love will triumph and that we will be able to put together a world of unity and peace.” Those are nice words, but that is not what Christmas means. Christmas is not about something we might do but about something God has already done: he has entered the insanity of our world through the person of Jesus so that he might redeem it, restore it, and make it beautiful.
Jesus wanted his disciple to be free from the control of fear. Because greed is fueled by fear, he took the opportunity to address it as well (and, in so doing, shared one of his most famous stories). Get out your Bible, open it to Luke 12, and let’s learn from Jesus how to live free of fear and greed.
A class member shared the following Frederick Faber poem regarding the fear of the Lord, which is so good I want to pass it along.
The Fear of the Lord (F. W. Faber)
My fear of Thee, O Lord, exults Like life within my veins, A fear which tightly claims to be One of love’s sacred pains.
There is no joy the soul can meet Upon life’s various road Like the sweet fear that sits and shrinks Under the eye of God.
Oh, Thou art greatly to be feared, Thou art so prompt to bless! The dread to miss such love as Thine Makes fear but love’s excess.
But fear is love, and love is fear, And in and out they move; But fear is an intenser joy Than mere unfrightened love.
They love Thee little, if at all, Who do not fear Thee much; If love is Thine attraction, Lord! Fear is Thy very touch.
Each week in Advent, I will post these minute-of-hope video or audio clips. During Advent, our hope is renewed and invigorated – and do we ever need that!
The Way Home 