The Advent of Life – December 23, 2013

Suggested Reading: John 17:1-5

Life is more than our heartbeat and our brainwaves. Life is more than just continuing to breathe and think and move. Real life is more than just existing. All people exist but not all people truly live.

Many of us settle for mere existence. Our culture teaches us that life is what we own. It tells us that he who dies with the most toys wins. The reality is that he who dies with the most toys still dies, and his toys are useless to him. But there is another way, a way to live and never die.

Jesus defined real life, the eternal kind of life, as knowing God. The moment we come to know God, we become spiritually alive; we receive the Holy Spirit, and become partakers of the divine nature. When this happens, we have embarked on the journey of becoming who we really are. We begin to live out our mandate to be the image of God, little representatives of Christ, each expressing our individual gifts and unique facets of the glory of God. Our core comes alive, and we become ever more ourselves as we learn to live and never die, to live the eternal kind of life.

When the baby Jesus breathed His first earthly breath, life came to live among us. Jesus Himself was and is the way, the truth, and the life. He is life made visible to us. He is the source and essence of life. He lived life to the full, showing us what the abundant and full life can look like. It wasn’t a life of material riches, but it was a rich life. He walked our dusty roads, breathed our air, and ate our food. He worked and paid taxes and lived a fully human life, a life fully alive.

He is our model, our older brother, the firstborn in our family. Through His life, death, and resurrection, He made a way for us to follow in His footsteps. We can know God and have real life. Through His life we find life.

Life was born at Christmas.

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Questions:

Have you entered into the eternal kind of life with Jesus?

How can you nurture this life?

How can you get to know Jesus better today?

The Advent of Abundance – December 21, 2013

Suggested Reading: John 10:1-18 

In my travels, I have seen extreme poverty. I have seen people trapped, without hope of escape from the downward cycle of scarcity. It is such a horrible thing to witness, let alone experience. I don’t know anyone who would knowingly choose poverty, if abundance was available. But I have seen many choose to live spiritually impoverished lives, often in the midst of physical abundance.

It seems that Jesus was getting at this bizarre dichotomy when He spoke about how hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. When we are physically comfortable, we tend toward pride and self-satisfaction, the subtle sins that so easily entangle. We somehow begin to feel that we deserve our abundance and we use our wealth to find new diversions, to mask the pain of our spiritual poverty.

Blaise Pascal, the scientist, mathematician, and philosopher, suggested that there is a God shaped hole in the heart of every man. This hole is like a vacuum that demands to be filled. Thirteen hundred years earlier Augustine described the same phenomenon when he observed that our hearts are restless until we find our rest in God. Both men were describing the longing of every human heart for a full heart and a full life.

The baby Jesus was born to bring us abundant life, a full life that flows from a full heart. He promised that anyone who came to Him would be filled to overflowing with the very presence of God; streams of living water welling up and flowing out so we might never thirst again. Imagine living in a desert land and hearing that kind of promise! It sounds too good to be true.

Nothing about God is too good to be true. He is the way, the truth and the life. Through Him, and only through Him, we can come to the Father. With this foundational divine relationship in place, all of life takes on a different tone. We can enjoy all the wonderful things God has given us, when we are not trying to draw from them more than they can supply.

The abundant life is not necessarily a life of abundance. It is a life of contentment whatever the circumstances, because you know the One who works all circumstances together for your good. It is the life Christ lived, and is now available to us in Him and because of Him. 

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Questions:

What is preventing you from experiencing the abundant life?

Is there something with which you have been trying to fill your heart?

How can you seek the abundant life in and through Jesus?