INTRODUCTION:One of the most obvious features of our Christmas celebrations is the gift-giving. How are we to understand this as Christians? What are the pitfalls? Are all the pitfalls obvious? Because our lives are to be lives of grace, and because charis means grace or gift, this is something we have to understand throughout the …
Christ Is Not at the End of a Supply Chain
The Puritan William Bridge noted that it is “man’s disposition to come to God at the second hand.” As we approach the Supper, we are sometimes tempted to think of God as the wholesaler, and the minister of the particular church as the retailer. But that is not how this is at all. God is …
Herod’s Soldiers at the Family Reunion
Being convicted of a sin is not the same thing as feeling vaguely bad about it. In Scripture, conviction is described as being “cut to the heart,” it is a heart-piercing. Jesus was born into this sinful world in order to deal with sin—to really deal with it. He is no false prophet, that we …
Caroling in Friendship Square
A Brief History of Christmas
INTRODUCTION:We celebrate the birth of Christ, and we are able to do this because we have seen what His rule has accomplished in the world. Jesus told Thomas once that there was a blessing for those who would believe without having seen the risen Christ, as Thomas had (John 20:29). On this principle, our place …
Christmas Answers Two Errors
During Christmas time, we celebrate the fact that the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal Word of God, permanently took on a human body. This means that the problem of the “material” as such has been solved. The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:14). But there are two problems to be …
Repentance Within
The accounts of the Lord’s behavior in the gospels tell us repeatedly that He would eat with outcasts. This included Gentiles outside the covenant of Israel, and we sometimes might assume that this was the point. But while Jesus did have “other sheep” that were not from the Jewish fold (John 10:16), He also would …
Celebrating Christmas Like a Puritan
INTRODUCTION:Socrates once famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. In a similar vein, the unexamined holiday is not worth celebrating. Whenever we do anything on autopilot, it is not surprising that at some point we forget where we are going, or what we were supposed to be doing. And when we are …
A Spiritual Meal
The Scriptures teach us that this is a spiritual meal, but we must exercise great caution as we think of it this way. This is not because there is a problem with how the Bible describes it—obviously not—but rather because a number of false assumptions about the nature of spirituality have crept into our thinking …
Evangelism in Particular
Economists talk about the problem of the commons. Every no one in particular is responsible for something, it often turns out that no one at all is responsible for it. We see this sort of thing on the macro-scale, with socialist experiments, and we see it on a small scale, as when none of the …